Creating a Multilingual WooCommerce Store for Free: A Complete Guide

When you’re running an ecommerce store, giving international customers access to your products and services is arguably the best way of winning new business. While creating a multilingual WooCommerce store might seem daunting—especially when considering budget constraints—there is a way to begin the journey without any initial cost.

For this guide, we're going to help you navigate creating a multilingual WooCommerce store for free, and also choose the solution that best aligns with your goals.

Starting Out On Your Multilingual Journey

Transforming your store into a multilingual WordPress powerhouse is more about creating an authentic shopping experience for your entire worldwide customer base than simple translation. In fact, there are unique challenges relating to ecommerce translation that you'll come up against:

• Product descriptions have to respect cultural nuances and local shopping behaviors while being effective too. This also goes for product variants and attributes, which need consistent translation.
• Every shopping cart and checkout element needs precise translation to ensure the customer is secure and safe. This includes button text and error messages.
• Any customer service content will need careful localization to maintain its helpfulness and accessibility.
• The payment gateways you choose to implement will have to display crystal clear information in order to build and maintain trust—and prevent cart abandonment.

Two areas that demand the highest level of accuracy are product 'tech specs' and any legal documentation (such as a terms of service). Accuracy here can help to prevent costly misunderstandings, mis-sold products, and returns. Any legal texts will typically need to be compliant in order for your store to meet the requirements of the locale you sell within.

Ultimately, these challenges can help to inform your choice of translation solution. While free options do exist, how each one handles these complexities can vary.

Free Translation Solutions: What's Available?

For most WooCommerce stores, there will be two options: the manual approach, and using multilingual plugins. Let's explore both of these, as the right choice will be central for creating a multilingual WooCommerce store.

The Manual Approach: A Recipe for Complexity

It's logical to assume that creating separate WordPress installations for each language (or using WordPress Multisite) would be the best approach to take. This might also seem easy on your wallet, but it can become a fast way to drain your resources and hurt your business.

For example, imagine updating a product's price, description, and inventory level for your primary language store. Now imagine doing that for all your products. Then repeating the process across all other language versions of your site.

If you miss one update or make some other error, you will have inconsistent information that could lead to customer complaints or lost sales.

In short, the approach is error-prone and a time-sink, especially for a growing or already large product catalog. The technical challenges don't end there either. Consider the following requirements for each site:

• Separate hosting configurations and SSL certificates.
• Individual plugin licenses and updates.
• Unique maintenance schedules.
• Independent security monitoring.
• Custom development work for features.
• Separate backup systems.

What's more, the SEO implications are equally concerning. For example, search engines struggle to understand the relationship between your different language versions without proper hreflang implementation—a technical challenge that often requires developer intervention. This can lead to poor rankings and lost organic traffic, effectively hiding your store from international customers.

Plugin Solutions: Hidden Complexities

Instead, a better option is to use a WordPress plugin to add translation functionality. The WordPress Plugin Directory offers several free translation options, although not all are suitable for the task at hand.

For instance, Polylang is a popular free plugin that boasts nearly 750,000 active installations. However, it offers no ecommerce support without its dedicated premium WooCommerce add-on.

This means essential features such as product variation translation, cart localization, and payment gateway translation sit behind the Polylang Pro paywall. This is something you might only discover after your initial setup investment time.

Another popular translation plugin is WPML. While it's a complete solution (and includes WooCommerce translation), there's no free version of the service.

Despite there being a lot of translation solutions on the market, not many include WooCommerce support within free tiers. Still, you can create a multilingual WooCommerce store for free using quality translation plugins. Let's briefly look at two of them.

Translate WordPress with GTranslate

The Translate WordPress with GTranslate plugin (GTranslate from here) positions itself as a budget-conscious solution. It leverages Google Translate's automatic translation service and offers access to over 100 languages in its free version.

However, GTranslate comes with significant drawbacks for ecommerce stores:

• The free version lacks proper multilingual SEO features, which might potentially limit your international visibility.
• Given the reliance on Google Translate, the translation quality relies entirely on machine translation. This can be problematic for product descriptions and technical specifications.
• WooCommerce compatibility in the free version doesn't extend to crucial elements such as checkout processes and dynamic content.

While GTranslate's cloud-based approach promises not to slow down your website, the dependence on Google Translate's automatic translation service could lead to inconsistencies in crucial sales content and customer communication. It's something to consider if you have ideas to grow and scale in the future.

TranslatePress

TranslatePress takes a more sophisticated approach with its visual translation interface. The plugin lets you translate your store's content from the front end using a visual-based editor. However, the free version presents several challenges:

• You're limited to a single translation language, which will restrict your international growth potential.
• Dynamic content translation can be problematic without technical intervention.
• Manual translation management might become cumbersome as your store grows.
• While the visual editor is intuitive, you might still struggle with complex WooCommerce elements.

Though TranslatePress integrates with Google Translate to achieve automatic content translation, the free version's limitations make it difficult to maintain consistent quality across your store's content in our opinion.

The Hidden Costs of Free Solutions

Premium tiers often offer so much value simply because free versions lack in some way. For starters, the developers of these plugins might consider there to be no income in providing free add-on services. While you can always find free translation plugins and services, WooCommerce is often not something you get support for unless the developer has attunement with its customer's needs.

As such, many translation plugins place the ecommerce features you'll need behind a premium paywall. You can see this with Polylang, where WooCommerce integration requires a paid upgrade.

What's more, product variation translation is often a premium feature, and you might find both payment gateway localization and cart translation needs extra investment.

Free solutions often require significant technical expertise too. This is in part due to the need to incentivize a purchase for a better experience. Given this, you'll often find you need to implement custom code for basic functionality, spend time on maintenance, and more.

However, the key is whether the plugin developer understands what customers want, and whether they can implement core functionality that is on par with its premium tiers. In this regard, Weglot stands out.

Getting Started with Weglot's Comprehensive Solution

Weglot's website translation tool takes a different approach to the competition through offering a functional free tier. This includes all of the essential features for creating a small multilingual WooCommerce store without cost.

Weglot provides comprehensive functionality from the start, and includes complete WooCommerce integration. This comprises an automatic, full product catalog translation as part of its first-layer of machine translation. Unlike other plugins, you get the same quality as premium tiers—we use DeepL, Google Translate, Microsoft Translator, and others to provide the best quality translations.

For WooCommerce, Weglot also gives you localization options for product variations, attributes, and payment gateways. Your cart and checkout also get translation—Weglot translates every piece of content on your site, including metadata.

Despite being on a free tier, you also get Weglot's best-in-class usability:

• There's a visual editing interface that lets you work with translations within a live context of the page
• Every site has 'proper' SEO implementation, suitable for a multilingual store. This includes applying hreflang tags correctly, translating metadata, setting the right structure and hierarchy behind the scenes, and more.

For a company such as skincare brand Polaar, this ease of use and 'behind the scenes' work boosts efficiency.

They translate from French into English and German. Initially, they began with English, but after understanding Weglot's workflow, they found they could scale and grow a little more by adding another language.

Using the free tier's 2,000 words and single language translation, you'll be able to learn for yourself how Weglot can be the backbone of your multilingual WooCommerce store.

How to Set Up Your Multilingual WooCommerce Store in X Steps

Building and creating a multilingual WooCommerce store for free can be faster than implementing premium tools and services. One reason is because you have less choice and scope at your disposal. Usually, this would be a hindrance, but here it works.

Let's quickly go through how simple it is to build a multilingual WooCommerce store. Note that you'll need a suitable domain name and hosting to give your shop a space on the web. There are plenty of approved options within our list of technology partners.

1. Install and Setup WooCommerce

If you have experience of installing WordPress plugins, you'll know how to do so with WooCommerce. We don't have to spend too long here, as the process is typical:

• Log into your WordPress site and navigate to the Plugins > Add New screen.
• Search for WooCommerce.
• Once you spot the card, click the Install Now button.
• After a few moments, this will change to a blue Activate button. Once you click this, WooCommerce is ready to work with.

You'll also need to go through the WooCommerce onboarding wizard, which helps you set up your store for your needs:

Once you complete this, you'll also need to add the products you want to sell. You can do this through the Products > Add new product page:

With your products ready to display, the next step is to create a suitable design.

2. Design Your Store in Your Primary Language

There are a few elements to consider here. The first is the overall look of your shop. This is where you need to choose a suitable theme for your site. The typical advice would be to choose a premium theme, but for a free store you won't be able to do this.

Fortunately, WordPress collects the majority of its free themes within the WordPress Theme Directory. You can even filter the themes to show those suitable for ecommerce sites:

If you have some decision paralysis over which theme to choose, we'd recommend you go with the official WooCommerce theme—Storefront:

This has a simple look and layout that the majority of customers will feel familiarity with. That's a positive, especially for quick deployment.

Designing Your Site

Onto the design itself, you'll likely go through this phase faster than if you bought a premium theme. This is because you'll have fewer options available to you—no bad thing if you need to go live and begin selling fast. However, you could also use free page builders such as Elementor if you need deeper customization.

It's also a good idea to build for the languages you'll eventually serve. By this, we mean that you should look to follow the same sorts of multi-language design principles for your primary locale. This includes design that focuses on localization styling and adaption.

At this point, you will also want to look into the design of your store's product pages. A theme such as Storefront will already offer a good experience without much tweaking. Regardless, it's always worth investigating whether you can adapt your page information and layout to your own needs.

3. Integrate and Setup Weglot

Once you have a store in place serving a primary language, you can start to incorporate others. This is where you'll use Weglot's free tier to power your translation, localization, and multilingual WooCommerce store.

In our tutorial on building a WooCommerce store, we go through the steps you need to install, integrate, setup, and use Weglot. To summarize, you sign up for an account, install the Weglot plugin, work with translated pages using the visual editor, and tweak your SEO to make sure customers can find you.

Remember: you'll need to sign up in order to receive an API key. Once you add this to the Weglot settings in the WordPress dashboard, everything will connect together.

A great time-saver with Weglot is how it handles complex yet necessary tasks behind the scenes. For example, it will host your translated content under subdirectories and automatically add hreflang tags so you don't have to.

When you carry out your design and integration with Weglot, it's important to prioritize high-traffic pages and popular products using manual translation too—something you can achieve using Weglot's editing interfaces: the Translation List and the Visual Editor.

To find those pages, you can use the Page Views screen within Weglot, which shows you the traffic hitting each page per language:

Last thing left to do is to offer users a way to choose a language on the front end.

4. Implement a Language Switcher

Given the complexity of a language switcher, you'll be surprised to learn they are simple to integrate and display on your site using Weglot. This functionality is usually a small menu on the front end where users will choose their desired language:

The design of your language switcher can take many forms. Using country and locale names in the target language is a good idea, and flag icons can also be great for usability. Regardless, adding the language switcher to your site takes seconds from the WordPress dashboard:

You can also make some changes within the Weglot dashboard too, such as by adding custom CSS or choosing a template for your switcher:

Now, you have all of the elements in place for creating a multilingual WooCommerce store for free. From here, you can begin to refine your shop and its translations in two key ways:

• Test checkout processes in each language and verify that your payment gateway functionality works as you intend across all regions.
• Monitor your conversion rates and adjust your content across different languages based on regional performance metrics.

This should be enough to see you through your first quarter. At some point, you may need to work with premium themes, plugins, and Weglot's other tiers. This happening is a good sign as it means your store is growing!

Making the Right Choice for Your Store

Starting with Weglot's free tier for translation makes perfect sense for many WooCommerce stores. It provides essential functionality without the need for a budget. This means you can start selling internationally immediately, then scale up as your business grows.

On the whole, consider the impact on your Return On Investment (ROI). Other solutions could restrict functionality, which can lead to additional expenses in development, maintenance, and eventual migration to more capable platforms. Weglot's model lets you start small and scale up with predictable costs and clear upgrade paths as your business grows.

You can even try Weglot's 10-day free trial and experience how professional translation capabilities can transform your WooCommerce store.