WooCommerce Multilingual Shop Setup Guide

When you translate your WooCommerce store, you’ll notice immediate improvements in how international customers interact with your products. They’ll find your items more easily, complete their purchases more frequently, and contact your support team less often with basic questions.

This impact is particularly powerful in markets like Germany, where 57% of consumers only buy from websites available in German. Without translation, you’re potentially losing more than half your possible customers in entire countries!

A properly translated WooCommerce store solves these international commerce challenges. Your customers will see prices in their local currency, appropriate shipping options for their region, and a checkout process they fully understand.

We’ve created this guide as your roadmap to conquering the complexities of multilingual WooCommerce. We’ll navigate technical challenges, and explore solutions tailored to your needs. By the end, you’ll be equipped to choose the perfect multilingual plugin, implement it with confidence, and optimize your store for global success.

Key takeaways

• Translating your WooCommerce store can double your potential customer base, especially in regions where buyers demand local language options.
• Plugins like Weglot enable store owners to launch a multilingual site in minutes.
• Automated translation of product catalogs, checkout flows, and currency displays ensures international shoppers enjoy a localized journey.
• Multilingual plugins automate best practices like hreflang tags and localized URLs, helping your products rank in local search results.
• Manage inventory, translations, and content updates centrally, so your store grows globally without added complexity.

Comparing WooCommerce Multilingual Plugins

Selecting the right translation tool to boost your WooCommerce store isn’t about finding the ‘best’ plugin. It’s about matching your technical capacity, budget, and growth ambitions to a solution that grows with your business.

If you’re wondering whether you need a plugin at all, given WooCommerce’s native language packs, it’s worth bearing in mind the extreme limitations and technical know-how needed to work with these. Those wanting to serve a diverse customer base will most definitely require a third-party solution, as you can see in our guide to WooCommerce language packs.

With this in mind, let’s examine four leading options through the lens of real-world store operations.

1. Weglot

Weglot’s website translation plugin takes a cloud-first approach, sidestepping theme and plugin conflicts by operating independently of your WordPress environment. Within minutes, store owners can activate multilingual functionality without touching code, making it ideal for teams lacking technical resources.

The platform combines instant AI-powered translations with an intuitive dashboard for human refinement, ensuring that product descriptions and checkout flows maintain brand voice while scaling across 110+ languages. A front-end Visual Editor makes it easy to manually refine translations, while ensuring they fit your existing designs.

In the context of WooCommerce, Weglot automatically translates product variations, attributes, and cart/checkout pages while preserving original functionality. Its SEO framework generates language-specific URLs and implements hreflang tags autonomously, helping translated product pages rank in local search results.

Pricing scales with word count and language count, starting at €150/year. Users can benefit from a 14-day free trial.

2. WPML

A veteran in WordPress translation, WPML requires the WooCommerce Multilingual add-on for full store compatibility. While powerful, its setup needs some technical skills – users must configure language-specific currencies, tax rules, and shipping classes manually.

Skilled developers will likely appreciate its granular control over translation workflows and compatibility with complex setups, but stores with 10,000+ products may encounter performance bottlenecks without server optimization.

Its SEO capabilities require manual hreflang tag configuration, making it better suited for teams with technical SEO expertise. Read our guide for more info on WPML translation management or study our Weglot vs WPML comparison.

WPML’s pricing tiers start at €39/year for basic blogs, although businesses will need the Multilingual CMS package at €99/year to gain automatic translations, string translations, and page builder support.

3. Polylang for WooCommerce

The Polylang plugin combines with a WooCommerce extension to handle product translations. Unlike cloud-based solutions, Polylang stores translations within WordPress, requiring manual input for each element from button labels to checkout fields.

While this hands-on approach appeals to purists, it may become time-consuming for stores with frequent inventory updates. The interface integrates directly into WooCommerce’s admin panel, letting you manage translated product variations and synchronized stock levels in one workspace. For a deeper understanding, read our guide to Polylang vs WPML.

SEO implementation is minimal. Users must manually configure language-specific slugs and metadata. Polylang with the WooCommerce extension starts at €99 for one site.

4. TranslatePress

Like Weglot, TranslatePress has a front-end editor, allowing for real-time translation previews alongside your live store design. This proves invaluable when localizing dynamic elements like mega menus or promotional banners.

The plugin handles WooCommerce content but lacks automatic synchronization for product variations. SEO features include manual hreflang tag configuration and translated slugs, requiring more hands-on management than the likes of Weglot’s automated approach. For a detailed comparison, read our blog on TranslatePress vs WPML.

TranslatePress starts at €99/year.

How Weglot Addresses Common Multilingual WooCommerce Challenges

Weglot’s website translation plugin is designed to eliminate the obstacles that come from going multilingual. Let’s take a look at how our plugin offers practical solutions to the most common multilingual challenges.

Handling Complex Product Catalogs

Managing translations for large catalogs with product variations, attributes, and categories can be overwhelming for many. Weglot automates this process by translating every element of your WooCommerce store, including product descriptions, attributes, and checkout fields. Inventory management remains centralized and hassle-free, no matter how many languages you add.

Ensuring Translation Quality

Accurate translations are essential for maintaining conversion rates. Weglot combines AI translation from top providers like DeepL with human editing tools. Store owners can refine translations or outsource them to professional translators directly in the Weglot Dashboard, ensuring descriptions meet the needs of local audiences.

Consistent Customer Experience

Switching languages mid-purchase often disrupts the shopping experience. Weglot ensures that carts and checkout processes remain consistent across languages, minimizing customer frustration and abandoned carts.

Simplifying Implementation

Weglot’s tech-free setup makes it accessible to all store owners, regardless of technical expertise. Installation takes minutes, and the plugin integrates with any WordPress theme.

Maintaining Store Performance

Unlike plugins that slow down heavily translated stores, Weglot stores translations on external servers. This approach prevents performance issues, even for stores with large product catalogs.

Boosting SEO for International Markets

Weglot automatically implements best practices for multilingual SEO, including language-specific URLs, hreflang tags, and metadata translation. This ensures that translated pages rank effectively in local search results, driving organic traffic from international markets.

Effortless Content Updates

Adding new products or updating existing ones? Weglot detects these changes automatically and translates them in real time, with no manual intervention required. This feature keeps your store up-to-date across all languages without additional effort.

Setting Up a Multilingual WooCommerce Store with Weglot

Thankfully, transforming your WooCommerce store into a multilingual powerhouse with Weglot is refreshingly straightforward!

After installing the Weglot plugin, all it takes is entering your unique API key in the WordPress dashboard to activate your fully translated store.

From there, Weglot automatically detects and translates all essential WooCommerce content, including product catalogs, variable products, attributes, pricing details, and checkout fields. Check out the following features that our users gain:

Language Switcher Placement

For ecommerce sites, visibility is key. As we’ve seen, Weglot automates hreflang tags to serve users your site in their local language. Users also gain the option of selecting a site language themselves, which is useful for regions with multiple languages, or those traveling abroad.

Weglot offers flexible language switcher placement and appearance options, allowing you to position it prominently in the header or integrate it into your navigation menu. This ensures customers can easily switch languages without disrupting their shopping experience.

Refining Product-Specific Translations

Weglot’s visual editor gives store owners full control over translation quality. Whether you’re fine-tuning technical specifications or ensuring brand terms are accurately localized, adjustments can be made effortlessly within the dashboard. This is particularly useful for stores selling complex or highly specialized products.

Multilingual SEO Optimization

Alongside hreflang tags, Weglot automatically creates language-specific subdirectories (e.g. website.com/fr for a French site) or subdomains (e.g. fr/website.com). This multilingual SEO structure ensures global customers can easily discover your store through localized search results. You can find a full summary of Weglot’s international SEO abilities in the section below!

Prioritizing High-Impact Pages

To maximize ROI, work on refining the automated translations on your high-converting pages like product descriptions and checkout flows. Once these are optimized for international audiences, you can expand to blog posts and other supporting content at your own pace.

Effortless Scaling for Growing Stores

Our website translation plugin has a price point for all website requirements! Whether you want to tread carefully and expand one language at a time, or are ready to go truly global, Weglot has a plan to scale in line with your needs.

SEO Best Practices for Your Multilingual Store

Optimizing your multilingual WooCommerce store for search engines requires more than just translating content; it demands a strategic approach tailored to ecommerce elements. Here’s how to maximize international visibility and boost your conversions:

• Product Schema Markup: Rich results are vital for ecommerce success. Ensure that product schema markup – covering price, availability, and reviews – is correctly implemented across all language versions. When paired with the likes of Weglot, a plugin like Yoast can be used to implement international schema with ease.
• Localized URLs for Keywords: Translated product URLs should reflect local keyword research rather than direct translations. For example, product categories and attributes should align with the terms customers in each market use when searching. Weglot will automatically translate your site URLs, title tags, and meta descriptions, while allowing for manual editing following your own international keyword research.
• Translated Reviews and User-Generated Content: Product reviews are a powerful trust signal for both customers and search engines. Weglot can translate reviews and user-generated content to ensure consistency across languages while maintaining their SEO value.
• Internal Linking and Content Symmetry: Cross-language internal linking is essential for maintaining strong site structure and boosting organic traffic. Consistent internal linking across languages can help search engines and users find your content with ease.
• Variable Products Across Markets: For variable products with different attributes or options in specific regions, ensure that each variation has optimized metadata alongside schema markup to avoid confusion in search results.

Launch Your Multilingual WooCommerce Store Today

Breaking language barriers is one of the smartest moves you can make to grow your WooCommerce store. Weglot addresses common challenges like translating complex product catalogs, handling variable products, and localizing the checkout process – and all without disrupting inventory management! With its intuitive setup, your store can go multilingual in minutes, saving you weeks of manual work.

Take inspiration from brands like The Bradery, which uses Weglot to translate over 500 new product launches daily, proving how scalable and efficient our solution is for growing stores.

Try our 14-day trial today and watch your conversions climb as you connect with customers worldwide.