A Step-by-Step Guide on What Happens When You Translate Your Website

English reaches a minority of the world's population, yet nearly half of all websites are written exclusively in English. This means there's a big share of potential customers who land on your site, can't engage with it in their language, and leave. Studies frequently cite that most shoppers rarely or never buy from English-only websites, yet prefer to purchase from a 'native-language' site.

Translating your website is obviously the right call, but the process can seem daunting. However, our guide will walk you through every stage to cover where the work happens, along with highlighting where your own judgment still plays a role. And, most importantly, where AI can ease the pain points.

Key Takeaways

• Website translation is deeper than just the visible text. It also includes metadata, checkout flows, dynamic content, forms, and error messages. Each of those layers needs to work in the target language for the experience to hold together.
• Weglot can automate the manual processes. The tool includes content detection, an AI Translation Model, automatic language URL creation, and hreflang tags without the need for developer support.
• AI translation gives you volume and speed. The AI Translation Model provides on-brand translations once you’ve added your brand guidelines, tone of voice, and additional custom instructions.

Understanding What Website Translation Actually Involves

To kick off, let's make sure you understand the distinctions between translation and localization:

• Translation converts text from one language to another in a technical sense, which doesn't account for any contextual nuances or specifics.
• Localization adapts date formats, currencies, cultural references and nuances, and the conventions that make a visitor feel the site was built for them rather than roughly adapted from somewhere else.

For most websites, a well-implemented translation is the bedrock layer and localization builds on top. The two work best together, most people underestimate the scope of what needs translating on a typical site.

The obvious content (such as your home page, product descriptions, and blog posts) are important, but a complete translation project also covers page titles and meta descriptions, form labels and validation messages, error messages, checkout flows, image alt text, and dynamically loaded content from third-party apps and plugins.

There are a few ways these layers matter:

• Metadata that isn't translated means your translated pages may fail to rank in local search results or even rank for the wrong language entirely.
• Forms and error messages that stay in the original language break the experience at a vital conversion point.
• Checkout flows that aren't localized can be abandoned at exactly the moment a new visitor is closest to becoming a customer.

All of this can often make website translation feel like a developer project. However, with the right underlying tool you can use your current resources to restructure your site, work on translations, localize your content, and even coordinate human translators for each language.

How to Translate Your Website with Weglot from First Click to Live

Weglot's website translation tool is best-in-class for its workflow just as much as the technical side. After signing up for an account, Weglot will automatically detect, translate, review, optimize everything for SEO, and go live, turning your site multilingual in an instant.

The difference from a manual translation project is that most of these stages happen without your input.

Let's run through what each stage involves, then talk about when you might need human intervention.

1. Installation and Connection

The first step is connecting Weglot to your website, for which the process will vary slightly depending on your platform, but all CMS integrations involve no developer input and take under 10 minutes to complete.

You can check out all our integration guides for more information.

One decision worth making at this stage is your URL structure. Weglot supports three integration types: JavaScript, subdirectory, and subdomain. For SEO purposes, the subdirectory or subdomain integration is the right choice as it creates dedicated URLs for each language version (such as yourwebsite.com/fr/).

The JavaScript integration is better suited to development, staging environments, or internal apps where SEO indexing isn't a concern yet or even required.

2. Automatic Content Detection

Once Weglot is connected, it scans the HTML source of every page on your site and finds all translatable content. Because it reads the page structure rather than just the visible text, it picks up your site's metadata as well as body copy in a single pass.

It's worth noting that if the same paragraph appears on multiple pages (maybe a shared footer description or a recurring product callout), Weglot generates the translation once and associates it with all of the relevant URLs, so there are no duplicate translations to manage or edit.

3. AI Translation

Weglot will not only automatically detect your content, but it also instantly translates your entire site with AI.

Weglot draws on three of the leading AI translation providers (DeepL, Google Translate, and Microsoft Translator) and automatically selects the engine that produces the most accurate result for each specific language pair. So, you get the best available baseline for every language you add.

Next, customize your AI Translation Model, connected to Gemini and OpenAI to improve your translations based on your brand guidelines, tone of voice, custom instructions and any glossary rules you’ll upload. This is a hands-off way to take your translations to the next level so they actually sound on-brand in your new markets.

4. Human Review (Optional)

If you want, you can edit your translations further with human review through Weglot’s Visual Editor, which provides you with a live preview of your website so you can edit in context.

There are two more tools to help you maintain consistency:

• The Glossary lets you set rules for terms that should always or never be translated. This could be product names, brand terms, and industry-specific language that needs to stay consistent across every page and language version.
• Translation Exclusions let you protect specific content blocks, URLs, or individual strings from translation if that content is not relevant to a target market.

5. Automatic Technical SEO

Weglot automatically handles both the technical translation and the SEO setup that a manual translation project would need you to configure. While the multilingual SEO specifics depend on the integration type you choose, the more common subdirectory and subdomain installations come with a raft of tweaks:

• Dedicated URLs for each language version. Each URL is independently crawlable and indexable by search engines so your translated pages inherit the domain authority you've built on your original site.
• Automatic hreflang tag setup. Weglot adds hreflang tags to your site's HTML <head> and to every translated page. This tells search engines which language version to serve to a user based on their location and language settings and prevents duplicate content issues.
• Server-side translation for full crawlability. Translated content is embedded directly in the HTML source to enable search engines to read and index it. In contrast, JavaScript-only translations are rendered client-side only, which search engines typically do not crawl.

In a nutshell, fixing a poor URL structure after launch will be much harder than implementing the right one at setup. Weglot's automatic implementation covers all of this without the need for additional configuration.

6. Setting Up Your Site's Language Switcher

With translation, SEO, and your URL structure in place, your multilingual site is almost ready. Thanks to the automatic redirection, Weglot will re-route visitors to the correct language version of your site.

However, Weglot also adds a language switcher to your site automatically. By default, it appears as a floating button on your site's front-end.

You're not stuck with the default positioning or presentation though. There are several ways to customize the switcher:

• Display options. You can show full language names, abbreviated language codes (EN, FR, ES), flag icons, or a combination. Weglot supports both shiny and matte flag styles. You're also able to show languages in a drop-down menu or as inline items.
• Placement options. You can add the switcher to your navigation menu, placed in a widget area, inserted into page or post content, or embedded directly in your HTML.
• Language switcher visual editor. You can use a visual editor for the language switcher if you prefer to work that way. This lets you drag the switcher to your preferred position on the page and get instant feedback on your design choices.

Our advice while designing your switcher is to first place it somewhere it will be found: the header and footer are both strong choices; a navigation menu item works well on smaller screens. Also, pick and choose your languages with care as this can clutter the switcher menus and give your visitors a poorer experience.

Where AI Translation Ends and Human Editing Begins

Earlier, we talked about what the first layer of AI translation gives your entire site. The AI Translation Model can be a step further than standard AI translation in a few ways:

• AI translation draws on multiple engines to produce context-aware translations across your full content set. This will often be accurate and consistent enough without further editing for your product listings, documentation, category pages, informational content, and more.
• Weglot's AI Translation Model is powered by OpenAI and Gemini to help you refine your brand's tone of voice. The most effective approach is to set it up before you start reviewing translations rather than after. You provide brand guidelines, a tone of voice description, and specific prompt instructions to help refine the translations.

You can see exactly which translations have been processed by the AI Language Model because each one is tagged in the Translation List. That makes it straightforward to filter, review, and manage AI Language Model translations as a distinct group.

When it comes to deciding where to apply a human review of your content, you may consider the following tiered approach:

• Your key landing pages and home page: These are where language quality most directly affects first impressions and conversions.
• Product descriptions and marketing copy: These benefit from close attention because tone carries commercial weight that the AI baseline may not fully capture.

Ultimately, you get to choose what content uses the AI Translation Model, such as a single page, a specific section, or your entire site in bulk. This is great for choosing what level of care you take over your most brand-critical content.

Keeping Your Multilingual Site Up to Date

One of the most overlooked parts of website translation is what happens after launch. Publishing new content will essentially create a gap between your original content and every translated version. Without a system to catch and fill those gaps, a multilingual site's content quality will degrade over time.

Weglot handles content synchronization automatically:

• New content is detected and translated immediately. When you publish in your original language, Weglot picks it up and generates a translation using your configured AI settings. The translated version goes live on the corresponding language URL without any manual action from your team.
• Updated content is flagged for review. When existing content changes, the affected strings are marked with a new status in your Translation List.
• Unchanged translations are preserved. Existing approved translations for content that hasn't changed aren't affected by new or updated content elsewhere on the site.

The distinction between launching and maintaining a multilingual site will help you plan your resources. Many Weglot users note how quick the maintenance aspect is, such as The Bradery:

“The biggest win for us is the time we’ve saved. It takes us about ten minutes twice a week to double-check everything is running how we want it. Everything else is done by Weglot.”

What Happens Next Is Up to You

If you came to this post unsure of what the website translation process involves, now you know how it works, how much technical work it requires, where AI fits in, and what your team's role looks like.

The process is more structured and more automated than most people expect, but Weglot covers the entire scope. Your job is to shape the output where your brand voice matters most, configure the AI Translation Model to reflect your tone from the start, and keep an eye on new and updated content as it moves through your queue.

If you're ready to translate your site and get back to other business-critical tasks, start your 14-day free Weglot trial and see how far the process takes you.