How to Add a Shopware Language Switcher to Your Store Using Weglot

The success of your multilingual store will often hinge on small yet crucial elements—and a Shopware language switcher stands at the forefront. It's the gateway that transforms your single-language store into a welcoming space for international customers, offering them the comfort and confidence to shop in their preferred language.

However, the intrinsic way of doing this in Shopware 6 isn't the most intuitive.

This tutorial will take you through everything you need to know about implementing a Shopware language switcher. It will cover the technical requirements, how to optimize the user experience, and much more. By the end, your store will be ready to serve customers in whatever language they prefer.

The Importance of a Well-Designed Language Switcher

Simply put, a language switcher lets visitors change the display language of your website with a minimal number of clicks. On the front end, this appears as a button or drop-down menu, but it actually coordinates a complex series of technical processes such as loading translated content, adjusting currency displays, implementing proper SEO signals for each language version, and more.

At its core, a language switcher serves as the control center for your multilingual store. It not only changes the visible text but also ensures that your storefront product information, pricing, shipping details, and checkout processes align with the selected language and region.

How a Language Switcher Impacts the User Experience

The way customers interact with your store hinges significantly on how well they can navigate between languages. A well-designed language switcher serves as a bridge between your content and international visitors, and it can create an immediate connection that says "You're welcome here."

When customers can easily find and switch to their preferred language, they're more likely to explore your products, engage with your content, and ultimately make purchases. In fact, three quarters of consumers prefer purchasing products with information in their native language.

As such, your language switcher needs to feel natural and intuitive beyond its functionality. This means presenting language options in their native form—displaying "Deutsch" instead of "German," for example—and ensuring the switcher maintains a consistent presence across your store.

Every interaction should feel smooth and purposeful to maintain the shopping experience rather than disrupting it. This makes your language switcher a critical touchpoint for international success.

The Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Benefits of Proper Switcher Implementation

The technical implementation of your language switcher plays a crucial role in your store's search engine visibility too. Search engines need clear signals to understand the relationship between different language versions of your content. Proper implementation will provide these signals through various technical elements.

At the foundation is URL structure—each language version of your store needs its own distinct URL pattern that search engines can easily crawl and index.

This works in tandem with hreflang tags. These complex and almost fearsome components explicitly tell search engines which language each version targets. If you implement this correctly, the tags will ensure your content appears in the right search results for each language market.

The SEO impact extends to your metadata as well. Each language version needs its own optimized meta titles and descriptions, which will help your store appear more relevant in local search results. This comprehensive approach to multilingual SEO can significantly improve your visibility across different markets.

Enhanced Customer Satisfaction

The relationship between language accessibility and customer satisfaction often runs deep. When customers can easily navigate your store in their preferred language, it creates a sense of trust and familiarity crucial for success. This goes beyond translation to help create a shopping experience that feels natural and inherent to each customer's language and culture.

Consider two ways that this affects the purchasing journey, especially for a customer that browses in a language that is relevant and familiar:

• They’ll feel more confident in their purchasing decisions overall.
• There's a greater chance of understanding product details, shipping methods, and return policies clearly, which cuts down on support requests.

This confidence often translates to higher conversion rates and lower cart abandonment. Ultimately, proper translation helps to cut away any roadblocks from conversion, as customers face fewer language-related uncertainties during checkout.

Adding a Shopware Language Switcher to Your Store

When implementing a language switcher on your Shopware store, you have two primary approaches: using Shopware's own basic functionality or implementing a dedicated third-party solution.

Each approach has distinct implications for your store's multilingual capabilities, but you'll likely look at what Shopware provides in the first instance.

Manual Implementation Through Shopware

Shopware provides basic multilingual functionality through its Sales Channel settings. It's going to be the first way you'll try to implement multiple languages on your site. While this native approach might seem appealing, there are limitations to be mindful of.

The major stumbling block is that a process isn't easy to find within the Shopware documentation. There are content creators that offer guides, but it's difficult to find the right information about the most current version of Shopware.

In general, to implement a language switcher using Shopware's own functionality, navigate to the Sales Channel settings from your dashboard. Here, you can configure different language versions for your store and set up the basic switcher functionality. The process typically involves:

• Installing the Shopware Language Pack.
• Creating separate sales channels for each language.
• Configuring domain settings for each channel.
• Managing translations through the administration interface.
• Setting up the language switcher display.

However, this approach presents several hindering challenges:

• This manual content management will become more complex as your store grows. Each product, category, and content page will require you to enter and update translations for each language versions.
• Shopware's native implementation lacks multilingual SEO aspects crucial for international visibility. While basic URL structures are available, it doesn’t implement hreflang tags and ensure optimal indexing across languages.
• When you make updates or content changes to your Shopware store, you’ll need to go back and manually update the translations for these parts too.
• Limited control and flexibility over your store’s translations. No access to translation management features like a glossary of terms—reducing your manual translation tasks.
• No access to machine translation—if you don’t know the language yourself, you’ll need to hire professional translators which can be costly.
• The user experience can feel disjointed, as switching between languages often requires complete page reloads and might not maintain shopping context between language versions. This can lead to frustrated customers and abandoned carts.

There's a better way to make your store multilingual and add a Shopware language switcher. Let's get into this aspect next.

Using Weglot for Automatic Language Switching

Weglot can offer a more comprehensive solution for adding multilingual capabilities to your Shopware store. As a dedicated translation plugin for all websites, including Shopify, WordPress, Magento (now Adobe Commerce), and more, Weglot approaches language switching from a holistic perspective, considering all aspects of the international shopping experience.

It combines automation with precise control over your multilingual content. Weglot detects your store's content (such as product descriptions and checkout) using a first layer of quality machine translation. Weglot then translates your site from a combination of leading providers including DeepL and Google Translate.

For Shopware users, Weglot offers several capabilities:

• Seamless integration with Shopware's theme, templates and product catalog system, ensuring all product detail pages, attributes, and specifications are properly translated.
• Automatic synchronization with Shopware's content management to ensure all content across blog posts, landing pages, etc are fully translated, including dynamic content.
• Full compatibility with Shopware's checkout process.
• Multilingual optimization to Shopware's own SEO functionality.

Once you use Weglot as your Shopware language switcher, you can leverage its other benefits and functionality, too. In fact, there are many aspects that Weglot handles on the backend:

• Machine translation with leading providers to give you fast translation that continuously updates when you make content changes.
• The platform automatically creates language subdirectories or subdomains for each language version.
• Those pesky hreflang tags won't be a problem, as Weglot automatically adds these too. This ensures search engines will properly index your multilingual content.
• The system will also maintain shopping context when a visitor switches languages. For example, if a customer is viewing a specific product and changes languages, they'll remain on that product page rather than being redirected to the homepage.

This attention on the user experience helps maintain engagement and reduce friction in the shopping process. Central to all of the functionality Weglot provides is the language switcher. Let's look at how to implement this next.

Adding Your Language Switcher with Weglot

The process of implementing a language switcher with Weglot is simple without sacrificing functionality. Step one is to create a Weglot account and follow the simple steps to your Shopware store. This includes:

• Choosing the languages you want to add to your site, separated into the default language and target languages.
• Picking a site hierarchy out of subdomains and subdirectories.
• Setting and validating your DNS entries.
• Adding a JavaScript snippet to the <head> section of your site.

Once you complete this section and connect your store, you can begin to work with your site's translations within the Weglot dashboard:

If you check out the front end of your site, you'll see that there's a Shopware language switcher in the bottom-right corner that follows typical ecommerce practices. Going back to the Weglot Dashboard, you can further optimize the language switcher through the Settings > Language Switcher page:

For instance, you can use custom CSS to work on the switcher's appearance. In the Languages appearance section you can work with the flags and presentation of each country in the list. You're able to drag-and-drop the new languages into the order you wish, and clicking on each one will let you customize the local language name and flag.

There's also the Switcher Editor that enables you to customize the switcher as it would appear on your site. All of these modifications take effect in real-time, which lets you fine-tune the switcher to your exact requirements.

Designing Your Language Switcher

The design of your Shopware language switcher will play a crucial role in how effective it is. Weglot provides an excellent foundation, and applying the right design principles can help you optimize your switcher for your specific audience.

In eccommerce, immediate visibility for your switcher is crucial—customers should never have to hunt for language options. The most effective placement is typically on the right-hand side, either at the top (where users naturally look for important navigation elements) or at the bottom, out of the way.

Intuitive language switching requires careful attention to visual hierarchy and interaction design too. As such, yours should be immediately recognizable while maintaining harmony with your overall design. Subtle yet clear visual cues help here, such as displaying a globe icon alongside the current language.

Best practices call for the text to be clear and legible, with language names presented in their native form to create an immediate connection with users.

Providing a Language Switcher on Mobile Devices

For mobile users, consider how your language switcher integrates with your existing responsive design. Desktop positions might not be suitable for mobile users, for example.

With mobile commerce representing over 60 percent of sales, optimizing your language switcher for mobile devices is essential. Mobile users face unique challenges when interacting with language switchers, from limited screen space to touch-based interaction requirements.

While desktop versions might display the full language name with a flag icon, mobile interfaces often need more compact solutions:

• Using only the language code (DE, EN, FR) in the header.
• Implementing an expanding icon that shows the language options.
• Placing the language switcher within the mobile menu for a cleaner header.

The key is maintaining visibility without cluttering the user interface, as mobile users interact with your store differently than desktop users. Touch and haptic feedback require specific design considerations, such as touch targets needing to be a comfortable size and have suitable spacing.

You might even consider using a full-screen language switcher instead of a typical drop-down menu as this can be problematic on touch screens. This accessibility is something lots of stores overlook, but is now a requirement. In fact, your international customers will likely have various abilities, and your language switcher should accommodate everyone.

The good news is that Weglot's inherent switcher design incorporates accessibility aspects. Coupling with services such as accessiBe and leveraging Shopware's own accessibility provision will give you peace of mind.

Frequently Asked Questions About Shopware Language Switchers

Before we wrap up, we want to make sure you understand practically everything about how to implement a Shopware language switcher. The following questions and answers should help plug some of the gaps in your knowledge!

How do I add multiple languages to my Shopware store?

While Shopware offers native multilingual capabilities through its Sales Channel settings, using Weglot provides a more streamlined approach. Weglot automates both the language addition and initial content translation process. In turn, this significantly reduces your setup time and future maintenance efforts. What’s more, with Shopware, you’ll need to provide the translations, with Weglot you get a fully machine translated site that you then get full editing control over.

Will a language switcher affect my store's performance?

With Weglot, the impact on your Shopware store's performance is minimal thanks to efficient code implementation and CDN delivery. The platform's optimization ensures you'll see quick loading times and smooth language switching without compromising your store's speed.

Can I customize the appearance of my language switcher?

Yes, Weglot provides extensive customization options while maintaining good technical practices. You can adjust the switcher's design to match your store's aesthetic through the Settings > Language switcher screen in the Weglot Dashboard. These changes will apply immediately, but you can also use the Switcher Editor to make changes while viewing the language switcher on the front end of your site.

A Shopware Language Switcher (and More!) Courtesy of Weglot

It might not seem like it, but your Shopware language switcher will be crucial for any multilingual success. This diminutive yet core piece of functionality is central to the experience your users have on your site.

Shopware itself provides native functionality for basic multilingual capabilities, but it falls doesn’t provide the translation aspect or any user-friendly aspects. In contrast, Weglot provides machine translation, full editing control, multilingual SEO and a language switcher you can customize without code.

If you're ready to add a Shopware language switcher to your store without fuss, try Weglot’s 10-day free trial and see how easy it can be to reach international customers.