Slovak uses letters most systems treat as exotic — ä, ľ, ĺ, ŕ, ô — and the usual result is that a visitor who types the word correctly finds nothing.
A small language with a large alphabet, inside the EU and the eurozone, next to markets that read a very similar language.
Somebody searching for a word without its diacritics should find it, and so should somebody who types it correctly. Default collation frequently satisfies neither.
A Slovak title becomes a slug by stripping diacritics. Done inconsistently the same article ends up reachable at two addresses, which splits its ranking.
Data stays inside the EU, close enough that residency and latency stop being a trade-off you have to reason about.
The languages are mutually intelligible and the markets are not. Separate variants with their own URLs beat one site that half-serves both.
Slovakia is in the eurozone. Prices stored in euros avoid the rounding artefacts that make a converted price look untrustworthy at checkout.
The giveaways are small and cumulative: a search that fails on a correctly spelled word, a sort order that puts Š in the wrong place, a price with three decimal places.
Central Europe is well connected, so the latency that remains is mostly a question of how far the origin is and whether the page was cached at all.
These differ from a standard WordPress site on the same plan, and each follows from the language and from being inside the EU.
| Setting | What we do | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Database collation | Slovak-aware, with accent-insensitive matching for search | Slovak's extended alphabet sorts and compares incorrectly under a default collation, so a visitor typing a word properly spelled can fail to find it. |
| Slug transliteration | One deterministic rule applied at publish and at import | Stripping diacritics inconsistently produces two working URLs for one article, which divides its authority between addresses that compete with each other. |
| Data residency | EU region with no replication outside the bloc | GDPR obligations are simplest to demonstrate when data never leaves the EU, and for Slovakia the nearest EU region is close enough that this costs nothing in latency. |
| Language variants | Slovak and Czech served as separate sites with their own hreflang | The two languages are mutually intelligible enough that publishers try to serve both from one site, and different enough that readers notice immediately when they do. |
| Currency handling | Prices stored natively in euros rather than converted at display time | Slovakia uses the euro, and conversion at render introduces rounding artefacts that make a checkout total look wrong at exactly the wrong moment. |
Every plan includes free migration, daily backups, SSL and 24/7 support.
Free migration, correct collation and sorting, and EU residency without the latency cost.