How To Add A WooCommerce Language Switcher (A Multilingual Store in 3 Steps)

Looking to translate your WooCommerce store and start selling internationally? Without using a translation plugin, there are only two ways of switching the language of your WooCommerce store. These are:

• You can switch your store’s default language. Switching your site’s default language takes a few seconds. From your WordPress dashboard, go to Settings > General. Find the Site Language drop-down and select the language you want.
  
  ‍Simple, yes. But it doesn’t actually do a whole lot—and it definitely doesn’t make your site fully multilingual. Changing your site’s default language simply translates the “built-in” content such as your “Add to Cart Button,” “My Account,” etc. into your new language. So, for example, you can change your default language from English to Spanish. All of your website’s main content stays in English, but those built-in elements we talked about are now in Spanish.

• You can switch your site’s back-end to a different language. Doing this is similar to the process above, but this is only helpful if the people working on your site are more comfortable with a different language than what your site is normally in. For example, if your site is in English but your team is made up mostly of German speakers. But again, this does nothing to change the actual content of your website. 

If you want to create a fully multilingual WooCommerce store (i.e., a website available in more than one language), then you need to use a WordPress translation plugin to translate your WooCommerce shop. 

And that’s what we cover in this post—how to turn your WooCommerce store into a fully multilingual website in 3 steps using multilingual plugin, Weglot. And, good news, Weglot has officially partnered with WooCommerce to provide a fully integrated way to translate your online store through WooCommerce Extensions!

Note: Weglot can translate your whole WooCommerce store without developers or API connections. And it can translate your entire site within minutes. See how simple (and fast) it is with a 10-day free trial.

Step-by-Step Tutorial: How To Make Your Woocommerce Store Multilingual with Weglot

Step 1: Add Weglot to your WooCommerce store

Adding Weglot to your WooCommerce takes just a few minutes. First, go to WooCommerce Extensions and search for the Weglot add-on. Next, click ‘Add to store’ and on the checkout page, click on the button “Place free order.“ 

You’ll then need to select which store you want to add Weglot to.

Step 2: Create a Weglot Account

Sign up for a Weglot account. This is where you’ll manage the translations of your ecommerce store. Once you’ve created an account, you’ll get a unique API key. Simply add this in the Weglot tab in your WordPress admin sidebar.

Step 3: Choose Your Languages

The next step is to select your original language (the language the site is currently in) and add new languages by selecting ‘destination languages’, then save changes. 

Weglot can translate your content into over 110+ different languages, including right-to-left languages like Arabic and Hebrew and custom languages such as American English and French Canadian.

After picking all your preferred languages and clicking save, Weglot will instantly translate your entire WooCommerce store using a first layer of automatic translation. 100% of your ecommerce store is detected and translated, including:

• Your checkout page
• Navigation menu
• All menus 
• All footers, headers, and widgets
• All product pages and descriptions
• All reviews
• And any other content that is currently live on the front end of your site
• All blog posts

Weglot then displays your newly translated ecommerce store under a unique language subdirectory (or subdomain, depending on your preference). 

Store Localization (Optional)

You can now access, manage, and edit your store’s translations through your Weglot Dashboard, which you can access directly from your WordPress site.

As mentioned, your WooCommerce store is currently translated using machine translation. Weglot uses the best machine translation providers on the market, Google Translate, DeepL, and Microsoft Translator, to give you an instantly translated store. 

Those who want to take things to the next level may want to consider some form of website localization to improve and enhance your customers' user experience. 

Website localization gives your new audiences the same experience as those who visit your native language store. So, for example, you pay particular attention to language nuances, ensure there’s a currency converter, and even translate media files. 

This can easily be done through your Translation List or Weglot’s Visual Editor, where you can update translations live and edit the machine translations to the website translation quality that fits your needs. 

Weglot allows you to edit your translations yourself, with teammates, by adding your translators or you can order professional translation through your Weglot Dashboard.

Customize Your Language Switcher

With Weglot, you can also choose how customers use the language switcher on your site. The language switcher is the little dropdown box you use to pick which language you want the site in.

You can customize this from your WordPress back-end in the Weglot plugin. 

‍But we do recommend that you turn on “Auto Switch.” When this is on, visitors are automatically redirected to whatever translated version of your site matches their browser language.

This is a major win for WooCommerce stores. Let’s say a French-speaking visitor finds your site, perhaps through an ad on social media, but the ad takes them to the English site. They may not stick around to notice a Language Switcher, but Weglot will automatically recognize their browser language and redirect them to your French site.

Weglot Optimizes For Multilingual SEO  

Weglot translates your WooCommerce site according to Google’s multilingual SEO best practices. This means:

• Weglot automatically creates separate language URLs. For example, our main site is mysite.com, but a German version would be mysite.com/de/. 

• Weglot alerts search engines that you translated versions of your site available. Weglot adds tags in your source code that tell search engines that you have translated versions of your site available. 

• Weglot translates your site’s SEO tags and metadata. You can also edit these translations to fit your specific SEO strategy.

Here are some examples of real-world audience growth that our customers have seen after using Weglot.

• Volant is a sustainable home scenting online brand that wanted to expand its English store into international markets. At first, they did the hard work, duplicating their content and translating it into German and Swedish. But they quickly realized this process wasn’t sustainable and wouldn’t let them grow as fast as they wanted. With Weglot, they could translate over 100k words into 9 languages in just a month. Thanks in large part to these translations, Volant’s website is seeing twice as many online visitors and a 39% increase in international revenue. (Read the full case study here.)

• Ron Dorff is a popular French-Swedish sportswear brand that relies heavily on online sales. After using Weglot to translate their popular site into English, they saw a 70% increase in international sales and a 400% increase in traffic over the year before. (Read the full case study here.)

A quick Recap: The Benefits of Using Software to Create a Multilingual Woocommerce Store

In this post, we’ve looked at two ways to switch the language of your WooCommerce store without using software. Both options are severely limited—they let you change the back-end of your WordPress site and built-in elements like your “Add to Cart” button. But that’s it.

If your goal is to have a fully multilingual ecommerce store, you need to use WordPress plugin, Weglot, which allows you to translate WooCommerce instantly.

Weglot can be easily added to your WooCommerce site through WooCommerce Extensions. Once added and connected to your Weglot account, you can get a fully multilingual site within minutes.

Plus, you can:

• Manage and edit your translations
• Customize the position and look of your language switcher 
• Get found by international visitors thanks to multilingual SEO 

Start your 10-day free trial today (no-commitment).