How To Build a Multilingual WooCommerce Store (step-by-step guide)

One key benefit of running an online WooCommerce store is reaching customers worldwide or in the multilingual markets you already sell in.

However, if you want to sell to people in other countries successfully, it’s important to add a WooCommerce multilingual plugin to your store. Providing a great localized experience that supports your visitors’ native language, even if it’s not English, will improve the functionality of your online store.

In this article, we guide you through how to add languages to make your WooCommerce multilingual using the Weglot translation plugin.

How To Create a Multilingual WooCommerce Store

For this tutorial, we’ll assume you already have some products added to your WooCommerce store and have picked a WordPress theme. We’ll also for the purposes of this article look at translating your online store from English to Spanish.

1. Set up Weglot

1. Sign up for a Weglot account. This is where you’ll manage your site’s translations and where you’ll 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 click on the Weglot tab. Add your API key, which you received when you signed up for a Weglot account. 

And that’s it! If you head over to your online store, you’ll notice a language switcher has been added to the bottom right corner on the front end of the screen. You can also customize the language switcher button in a variety of ways (through your Weglot tab in your WordPress Dashboard) such as changing the flags and adding it as a drop-down.

With Weglot, you get a first layer of machine translation. You then have full control over these translations, so you can make manual edits yourself, add your own translator to your dashboard or order professional translators through Weglot.

2. Translate Product Pages

Weglot translates not just posts and pages in your WordPress site but also custom post types and custom taxonomies, including WooCommerce products and their categories and tags. So when you add WooCommerce product pages to your store, Weglot will automatically translate them for you and synchronize thereafter.

Your translated products will be stored in the Translations section of your Weglot account, along with your translated posts, pages, and other content. This is where you carry out translation management. You can search for specific products to find their product translations using the Search field in your Translations List view.

You can also use the Visual Editor to check the translations and edit them if you need to.

3. Translate Your Shop Page, Cart Page and Checkout Page

As well as individual products, Weglot automatically translates your WooCommerce shop page, cart page and checkout pages.

This means that the entire purchase process is conducted in the user’s language, meaning you don’t lose potential customers because they have to switch to English.

Weglot will automatically translate any store pages you add to your site. It will also translate any WooCommerce widgets such as the cart widget. Here’s how to do it:

1. Create your cart and checkout pages. Create empty static pages for each of these and WooCommerce will automatically populate them with the content of the checkout, cart, etc. There’s no need to create a main store page since WooCommerce automatically does this for you.

2. Then, go to WooCommerce > Settings > Advanced and select the pages you’ve created and assigned them to the relevant WooCommerce page types. Weglot will automatically translate all these pages from your default language.

As customers checkout on your site, WooCommerce will generate notifications to tell them what’s in their cart. Weglot will dynamically translate these for you as they’re generated, as you can see if you check your Translations screen.

That means you don’t have to do anything manually to translate your store pages, widgets and notifications. Unless you want to manually edit the translated text for user experience or SEO, you can leave Weglot’s machine translation to do everything for you.

4. Translate Important SEO Elements

Your multilingual site also has elements that are important for search engine optimization; elements that can help you rank more highly in Google and other search engines.

These will include:

• URL slugs for posts, pages and custom post types
• Page and post titles
• Page and post meta descriptions
• Image alt tags
• Product categories and tags

Weglot lets you translate all of those so your WordPress website is SEO-friendly. Let’s take a look at each.

Translating URL Slugs

URL slugs are automatically generated by WordPress in your main language, and you can edit them manually in your post or page editing screen for both SEO and user experience (UX).

So if you’re writing blog posts for your store’s SEO, you can create a translated version of their slugs to target search terms that might be used in your target languages.

On the post-editing screen, scroll to the bottom of the screen to the Weglot URL translate section. Here, you can directly edit the URL slug for that post in the translated language.

Save your changes by updating the post. Search engines will then be able to use that slug as part of the metadata that will help them classify the site.

Translating Post and Page Titles

Weglot’s machine translation automatically translates post and page titles, along with post and page content.

Just like the content, you can edit them via the Translations screen in Weglot or by using the Visual Editor. Click on the post or page title in the Visual Editor and edit the translation for SEO if you want to include keywords that people will be searching for in the translated language.

Translate Page and Post Meta Descriptions

By default Weglot translates all your metadata, if you’re using the Yoast SEO plugin, this is also compatible and fully translated by Weglot.

Weglot will then translate this text. You’ll find the translated meta description if you inspect the code behind your translated post, page, or product.

This means that search engines can use your translated meta description to understand your site and place it higher in search engine rankings.

Translate Image Alt Tags

When you add images of your products to your store, Weglot will translate the alt tags you add to those images.

First, make sure your product image has an alt tag. You can set this by editing the image and opening the media settings screen.

Weglot will translate this for you when you visit the product page. You can see the translated tag if you inspect the code behind the page.

Translate Product Categories and Tags

When you add product categories to your WooCommerce store, Weglot will add them to your translations and translate them automatically.

Start by adding a product category or tag via Products > Categories or Products > Tags.

These will then be added to your translations. When you visit the translated tag or category page, you’ll be able to see them in the foreign language.

Note that if your store uses product attributes, these will be translated too.

Like other content, you can access these translations via the visual editor or the Translations List in Weglot and manually edit them if you want to optimize them for SEO or UX and include keywords.

Getting Started With Your Multilingual WooCommerce Store

Making your WooCommerce store multilingual expands your market reach to the world and allows website visitors to browse your store in their preferred language.

While there are manual methods of creating a multilingual online store, WooCommerce translation doesn't have to be complicated: A plugin like Weglot takes care of the whole process in minutes.

Ready to make your WooCommerce store multilingual? Try Weglot’s 10-day free trial today.