How to Translate Your WooCommerce Store

Your WooCommerce store has the potential to reach a wide audience, but a language barrier could affect your plans to take your store global.

Translating your WooCommerce store opens up a world of possibilities, providing a better user experience, improving your customer service, and enhancing its appeal.

WooCommerce’s built-in translation features allow you to translate the language of your store, including features such as your checkout page. You can even change just your dashboard language if preferred.

However, WooCommerce’s built-in features have their limitations.

For example, if you want to translate elements such as your product descriptions or shipping methods, you’ll need to handle this manually. By default, WooCommerce also limits you to serving your ecommerce store to customers in a single language.

Using manual methods to translate your WooCommerce store can be time-consuming and costly. And, due to the technical knowledge and skills required, there is the potential for error – including weakening your SEO performance.

An AI translation plugin could be just what you need to translate your store, saving time and money with translations that stay accurate, consistent, and on-brand in every language.

In this article, we’ll discuss the challenges of manual WooCommerce translation and why a plugin like Weglot could be the right fit to help you bring your WooCommerce store to a global audience.

The Challenges of Manual WooCommerce Translation

WooCommerce has some basic built-in features to help you translate your website. In just a few clicks, you can change the language of your store or change your dashboard to the language of your choice.

Change Your WooCommerce Store Language

To change the default language of your entire WooCommerce store, do the following:

1. Head to your WordPress Dashboard > Settings > General.

2. Change your Site Language from the dropdown menu.

3. Return to Dashboard > Updates.

4. Click Update Translations to ensure your site is translated correctly.

5. When the process is complete, you’ll be transferred to a new page where you can see the translation updates.

Changing Your Dashboard Language

If you want to change only the dashboard language on your WooCommerce store, start by following the above steps. Ensure you select the language you want your dashboard to be displayed in from the Settings page.

1. Return to Settings > General and use the Site Language dropdown to change your site language back to the language you want the front end of your store to be in.

2. Visit Users > Profile.

3. Use the Language dropdown to select the language you want to use for your WordPress Dashboard.

This will ensure your dashboard is translated according to your chosen language, but the front end of your store won’t change.

For more detailed steps, WooCommerce offers detailed translation guidance for store owners.

Using WooCommerce’s base translation functions gives you some flexibility in changing the language of your website.

However, using these settings will only change the content provided by WooCommerce itself. Any additional content you’ve created – for example, product descriptions – won’t be translated.

On top of that, the limitations of WooCommerce’s default translation features mean you will only be able to translate your store into a single language at a time. Some languages may also be missing from WooCommerce.  

To remedy some of these issues, you can work on translating your content manually. But this does present some challenges, including:

• Language proficiency: Translating content correctly requires a certain level of language skill. If you lack these skills yourself, you may need to hire translators with the right level of proficiency for your needs – something that can cost a lot of money, especially if you need to translate your content into more than one language.
• Time and effort: Translations can be a time-consuming task, particularly if you manage a large website with a lot of written content or regularly update your content.
• Technical complexity: Manual translation can require modifying code within the back end of your site, which can lead to issues such as layout distortions, broken links, and inconsistent translations.
• Multilingual SEO: Maintaining effective SEO in multiple languages can be difficult, as metadata also needs translating, and hreflang attributes need to be applied correctly, among other requirements.
• Updating translations: Translations for WooCommerce stores require ongoing maintenance when content is added or updated, which can lead to significant ongoing costs.
• Translation inconsistencies: Manual translations can sometimes lead to inconsistencies, especially if you run a larger multilingual WooCommerce store where different team members carry out translations.

While WooCommerce can provide some basic solutions to your translation issues, these limitations can prove frustrating for website owners. An AI translation plugin can help you overcome these challenges for more effective WooCommerce translations.

The Smart Way of Translating WooCommerce: Introducing Weglot

If you’re looking for the best plugin to help translate your WooCommerce store to serve a multilingual audience, then Weglot could be just what you’re looking for.

Weglot 2.0 builds on the Weglot you know, taking the translation work off the plates of store owners, developers, and SEO managers. Its AI Translation Model creates translations shaped by your Brand Voice and Translation Guidelines, so your product pages read like your brand from the very start, and you review them in context with a redesigned dashboard and Visual Editor.

The result is a store that feels unmistakably yours in every market: one consistent brand experience across your multilingual site, control over how your brand comes across in each language, and translated pages ready to be found in search engines and in AI search tools such as ChatGPT and Perplexity, all from one connected workflow.

Even better, Weglot is an official WooCommerce partner. That means you can add the Weglot translation plugin directly from the WooCommerce marketplace. Within minutes, you’ll have a fully multilingual store. Learn more about the Weglot and WooCommerce partnership.

Translation into 110+ Languages

Weglot can translate your WooCommerce store into more than 110 languages with its AI Translation Model, which combines leading AI models with your Brand Voice, Translation Guidelines, and the context of each page.

That context is what keeps quality consistent across language pairs. Whether you translate your English store into French, Spanish, or Japanese, product names and key terms follow the rules you set, and every description keeps the same tone.

With so many languages available, you can make your online store accessible to a global audience and provide an excellent user experience for all, no matter where they’re shopping from.

Translate Your Content Automatically

One major downside of manual translation is the requirement to constantly update your website to translate new content as it’s added.

With Weglot, however, you get automatic content detection and AI translation, which keeps your website up to date without you having to track every change.

Whenever new content is added, Weglot automatically detects it and creates AI translations in all of your chosen languages, so no content gets missed. For growing businesses, that means you can focus on updating your content while Weglot takes care of the rest.

Take a look at The Bradery, for example. They upload more than 500 products each day - imagine having to translate all those product pages every single day!

That’s when they found Weglot, which perfectly matched what they were looking for: a quick, effortless way to translate pages each time new content was added.

Manage Your Translations from a Single Dashboard

Weglot makes it easy to manage your translations with the help of a cohesive dashboard.

From here, you can edit translations manually, on your own or together with your existing team.

You have two translation editors to work with: the Translation List and the Visual Editor, where you can view your translations within a live preview of your site.

Weglot’s dashboard also has Translation Guidelines, where you set rules such as always translating a term a certain way or never translating your product names, and a Brand Voice page where you describe how your brand should sound. The AI Translation Model follows both, which keeps your wording consistent and supports effective content localization.

Multilingual SEO Features

With multilingual SEO features like language-specific URLs, metadata translation, and automatic hreflang tag implementation, Weglot can help your WooCommerce store rank in global search engine results and be discovered in AI-powered search. You’ll get to maintain the hard work you’ve put in to achieve your Google ranking.

By updating hreflang tags automatically whenever a new piece of content is translated, Weglot ensures that your audience is always served the correct language version of your website, providing a smooth user experience.

Built-in Language Switcher

In instances where users do want to view your WooCommerce site in a different language, Weglot’s built-in language switcher enables customers to choose their preferred language, making it easy to adjust their shopping experience to meet their needs.

That gives them a better user experience, as they’re able to view products, the cart page, and the checkout page in their chosen language.

Every time you add a new language to your site, it automatically appears in the language switcher, too.

With these features and more, Weglot takes the difficult, time-consuming parts of website translation off your plate, so your store reaches a global audience faster, with translation quality you can publish without a rewrite.

How Weglot Simplifies WooCommerce Translation

You don’t need to go through translation services to have a multilingual WooCommerce store. This step-by-step guide demonstrates just how easy it is to translate your WooCommerce store with Weglot, going the WordPress plugin route

1. Sign up for a Weglot account. During setup, you’ll add your store’s URL, choose your original and translated languages, and tell Weglot about your brand so your translations match its voice. This is also where you’ll manage your translations and get your unique API key.
2. Search for the Weglot extension on the WooCommerce Marketplace and click “Add to store”.

3. Next, on the checkout page, click on the button “Place free order“

4. Then click the “Add to store” button on the next page.

5. Select the store where you’d like to install the Weglot extension. Weglot is now installed on your website!
   

6. Then head to your WordPress dashboard and open Weglot > Settings. Paste the API key you received when you signed up for your Weglot account.
Your original and target languages appear automatically, and you can change them any time from the Weglot dashboard.

Your WooCommerce store is now multilingual: Weglot detects its content and creates AI translations in each language you chose.

If you want to make any manual changes to these AI translations, the Visual Editor lets you manage them with ease.

It will display a preview of your website, allowing you to edit translations directly on the page. To see how this works in practice, you can check out the interactive demo.

This walkthrough only covers the basic setup of the Weglot plugin, designed to provide you with a simple overview of Weglot’s key features.

But this only scratches the surface of how Weglot can help with translating your WordPress website with WooCommerce installed. To experience the full feature set, including AI translations tuned to your brand voice, the translation management dashboard, Image Translation (every workspace gets 20 image credits), and multilingual SEO features, try Weglot on your website free for 14 days.

Get Started with Weglot and Transform Your WooCommerce Store

Translating your WooCommerce store opens your business up to a global audience. Offering your online store in multiple languages can not only help you reach audiences across the world, but it can also provide a better customer experience and help develop long-lasting relationships.

Plus, when your ecommerce store is optimized for multilingual SEO, your international users will find you more easily in their preferred language.

As we’ve seen, WooCommerce has its own built-in features to help translate elements of your online store, but the limitations of these features may not provide you with what you need.

Manually translating numerous elements of your site can be time-consuming and costly. If you want to translate your site into multiple languages, WooCommerce’s default functionality isn’t going to cut it.

Weglot is a translation plugin for WordPress built to help you translate your WooCommerce store for a multilingual audience.

With Weglot 2.0, your AI translations speak like your brand from day one, guided by your Brand Voice and Translation Guidelines, and your store keeps one consistent identity in every market you sell to. Built-in multilingual SEO helps you maintain and grow your presence in search results and in AI search tools such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, and AI Overviews, and you manage all of it from one connected dashboard.

Ready to experience these benefits for yourself? Get started with Weglot with a 14-day free trial and see how it can take your WooCommerce store to a whole new level.