How to Make a Shopware Website Multilingual

Today, the range of tools available for entering the world of e-commerce is vast. Although market leaders in e-commerce platforms such as Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, and Magento have become mainstream, other solutions may cater to specific needs or have a strong geographical presence. This is the case with Shopware.

Shopware is a robust and highly adaptable e-commerce platform that is rather popular in the DACH (Germany, Austria, Switzerland) and Benelux (Belgium, Netherlands, Luxemburg) regions. Today, Shopware supports tens of thousands of e-merchants, offering them a solution that meets all their needs, whether in a B2C or B2B context. As well as enabling online shop owners to provide an optimized and pleasant shopping experience for their users, Shopware focuses on data protection and full access to the site's source code to design an increasingly customized site. 

The reason why Shopware is so popular, particularly in Germany and the Netherlands, is that the company is based in the small town of Schöppingen (not Shopify 😉 ) in Germany, just a few dozen kilometers from the Dutch border. Among the many users of the Shopware ecommerce solution are a number of well-known companies such as the Borussia Dortmund Fanshop, Stabilo, and Powerbar.

As with all ecommerce platforms, it is possible to translate a Shopware website into several languages, particularly with Weglot. Here, you can find out more about best practices for translating a Shopware website and optimizing it for multilingual SEO. 

Step-by-Step Guide to Translating Your Shopware Website 

Step 1: Create a Weglot Account

Nothing very complicated here (as is the case with the rest of the process, actually). You’ll only have to create an account here. This account will allow you to access the Weglot Dashboard on which you’ll be able to manage your multilingual content displayed on your Shopware website.

Step 2: Indicate the Technology You Used to Develop Your Online Shop

You won’t find Shopware in the listing, but no worries, you’ll just have to scroll down and choose “Other”.

Step 3: Indicate the Language(s) You Want to Add to Your Shopware Site

In this step, enter your actual domain and specify your site's original language (the one it was created in). For instance, if English is your site's original language, give it a shout-out!

Now, the exciting part – choose the languages you want your website to converse in. In this scenario, let's say you're adding a touch of French to your English website. 

And that’s it! Your Shopware website is now translated and ready to be broadcast to French-speaking audiences and even more, if you wish to. 

Step 4: Customize Your Translations

Some of our users fully rely on machine translation to make their websites multilingual. You may want to manually edit your translations to give more context to them and to emphasize your brand identity and way of speech. 

Good news, that’s exactly what the Weglot Dashboard allows you to do. Once logged in to your account, you’ll be able to access all the first layers of automatic translation provided by DeepL or Google Translate. Plus, you’ll be able to correct them. 

You’ll even be able to set up glossary and exclusion rules, customize the language switcher button, get some statistics about your Shopware website traffic abroad… 

All the aspects of your online shop will be translated and accessible through the Weglot dashboard. 

As you can read here, easily translating a Shopware website is possible thanks to Weglot. Moreover, besides the visual aspect of website translation, our tool will allow your website to get high performance in terms of international traffic. That’s because Weglot is built around Google’s multilingual SEO requirements. Let’s dig into it! 

Shopware Site Owners Gain SEO Advantages With Weglot

Multilingual SEO is like giving your website a passport to sell your products internationally. It involves optimizing a website for search engines across multiple languages. It also ensures that your site ranks well in search results for users across diverse linguistic backgrounds. 

As mentioned above, Weglot follows Google’s multilingual SEO requirements through different elements such as: 

• Unique URLs per locales: Weglot ensures that translated pages are displayed on SEO-friendly URLs. This is crucial for search engine visibility and user experience, as it helps search engines understand the content in different languages.
• Hreflang Tags: Weglot automatically adds hreflang tags to the HTML code of your Shopware pages. These tags indicate to search engines which language versions of a page are available and what is the path between the different languages.
• Metadata and Alt tags Translation: Weglot allows users to translate meta titles, meta descriptions, and alternative texts for each language. This ensures your Shopware website appears correctly in search engine results across different languages, improving click-through rates.
• Server-side Translation: Weglot translates your Shopware website content server-side, ensuring your pages are translated before reaching visitors' browsers. Google views server-side translation as a best practice, enabling efficient detection and indexing of translations in the source code.
• Real-Time Updates: As you make changes to your original content in Shopware, Weglot automatically updates the translations in real time. In terms of multilingual SEO, it's highly important to have 100% of the content translated on the same page.

All these elements, automatically handled by Weglot after the integration of this tool to your Shopware webshop, will ensure that all translated content is properly indexed by search engines such as Google, helping your Shopware website rank well in search results for users speaking various languages.

Weglot or Shopware Native Translation Features: What Are the Differences

Thanks to a native feature directly accessible through the Shopware admin, Shopware website users can make their online shop multilingual. Weglot is a third-party compatible with Shopware, also allowing users to make their website multilingual and optimized for multilingual SEO. Both methods work great and address different use cases. We’ll explain a bit more about the two Shopware website translation solutions to help you pick the one that fits your specific needs best. 

Here is a recap of the differences between Weglot and the Shopware translation solution: 

• Creation of the multilingual shop: Using the Shopware native solution, you’ll be able to set up your domains for the different languages, using subdirectories, directly on the Shopware admin. Using Weglot, you’ll simply need to integrate this third app on your Shopware website and manage the domains on your DNS settings. 
• Product page translation: On your product pages admin on the Shopware side, you’ll have to manually translate all the product titles and descriptions for each product. The process is quite similar for categories. On the other hand, while using Weglot to translate your Shopware website, this tool will automatically translate your whole content, including product pages, categories and so on. Then you’ll just have to proofread and manually edit the content if you want to on your Weglot dashboard. 
• Content translation: If you want to translate the rest of the content using Shopware’s native translation feature, like menus, checkout, articles, and other aspects of a Shopware website, you’ll need to integrate existing translation snippets or create your own one manually. In comparison, as mentioned before, Weglot will translate every part of your Shopware website automatically and then give you access to an admin on which you’ll be able to customise your translated content.

Conclusion 

Making your Shopware website multilingual is a crucial step for expanding your reach, and both Shopware's native translation features and Weglot offer effective solutions. Shopware's native feature provides direct accessibility through the admin, allowing users to set up domains for different languages and manually translate content. On the other hand, Weglot, as a third-party option, simplifies the process with automatic translations, real-time updates, and robust multilingual SEO features. The choice between the two depends on your specific needs, preferences, and the level of control you desire in managing a multilingual online shop. Whether opting for Shopware's native solution or integrating Weglot, the goal is to create a seamless, user-friendly, and globally accessible shopping experience for your audience.