How To Build a Multilingual WooCommerce Store (Plugins & Guide)

One of the key benefits of running an online WooCommerce store is reaching customers all across the world, or even 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 guide, we’ll look at the business benefits of adding new languages and provide a step-by-step tutorial explaining how to create a WooCommerce multilingual store using the Weglot translation plugin for WooCommerce.

Is WordPress Multilingual?

One of the questions many WordPress users ask before starting out their multilingual WooCommerce store journey is whether it’s natively multilingual in the first place, or if they need to look for a multilingual WordPress plugin.

Currently, WordPress doesn’t offer a native feature. However, it is planned in the long-term roadmap. We just don’t know when this will happen.

If you want to add multiple languages to your WooCommerceWordPress site, that means right now, your options are either multiple stores for multiple languages or choosing a popular WooCommerce translation plugin.

The Benefits of Creating a Multilingual WooCoommerce Store

A multilingual ecommerce site means you can potentially sell to many more customers than you could with a single-language store. Even customers in your  own country who might speak a different language.

For example, in the USA, 41 million people speak Spanish at home, and many millions more speak another language other than English.

Having a multilingual WooCommerce store not only makes it easier for those people to buy from you, but it also serves you in many other ways.

• International SEO: Making WooCommerce multilingual will also give you better international search engine optimization and visibility. With a good WordPress multilingual plugin, you can edit your translated content to make it rank for search terms being used in different languages, and you’ll show up when people search in multiple languages and in multiple territories.
• User experience: For potential customers speaking different languages, translating your WooCommerce store will improve user experience. They’ll be able to read product descriptions in their own language and work through the checkout process without having to use a tool like the in-browser Google Translate to help them. This will boost conversions make it easier for people to buy WooCommerce products from you.
• Inclusiveness: A multilingual store sends a message that you value your international customers and want their business. Plus, it tells all your visitors and customers that you’re an inclusive, outward-looking brand not focused on just one group of people.
• Credibility: Even for those customers who speak English, it will build your credibility as a brand. Customers speaking translated languages will have more trust in your site and your business, and English-speaking customers will see that you’re an international brand with a wide reach.
  

Of course, let’s not overlook the obvious either…increased revenue! And, if you’ve already seen traffic from international customers to your store, you can bet that a multilingual website will do even more to convert.

WooCommerce Translation Plugin vs Multiple Stores  

First, let’s address the reasons for making your WooCommerce a multilanguage store with a translation plugin versus going down the multiple-store route will lead to a better translation management flow and integration.

One of them might have been to duplicate your store as many times as the number of languages you want to add. Then, use a translation agency for the translation.

This method is costly, hugely time-consuming from a website management point of view, and could ultimately lead to parts of your WordPress websites not being fully translated. Each time you add new content to your store, you’ll need the help of translators to translate the text and then update the content manually on your translated store.

Another method used by some WooCommerce users is to use the integrated WordPress multisite feature to link multiple stores together to reduce some of the manual aspects mentioned above.

This helps somewhat in that all your stores are managed under one WordPress dashboard rather than separate ones. But it still requires the translation part, and you’re still managing multiple stores without any real automation.

On the other hand, there’s the option to use a WooCommerce translation plugin such as Weglot. Weglot handles not only the translation of your WooCommerce store but also displays the content under language subdirectories.

Other key benefits include:

• WooCommerce translations are all handled under one interface
• No need to duplicate your store
• 100% of your content detected and translated (including new content)
• Machine translation, manual editing and the option to add or order professional translators, or enlist a translation service  

How to Pick A WooCommerce Translation Plugin

Once you have a hang of your translation requirements, you’re on your way to understanding the things you should look for in a WooCommerce translation plugin besides automatic translation. Let’s take a look at those features.

• Integration: Many choose WPML for their WooCommerce translations. But this plugin, like many others, requires you to manually duplicate and translate strings individually or make you download and install WooCommerce multiple plugins with different interfaces to manage other parts of your site. Weglot’s WooCommerce integration takes just 5 minutes. There’s no manual work involved when it comes to creating translations. It automatically detects, translates, and displays any new content you add or change.
• Compatibility with WordPress + WooCommerce: The translation plugin you choose should be able to seamlessly integrate with WordPress and WooCommerce. There are many such hidden text strings that can get overlooked if your WooCommerce translation plugin isn’t comprehensive.
• Intuitiveness and ease of translation: When translating your site language, you’ll also need to translate strings generated by WordPress, WooCommerce, and associated themes and plugins, also called “gettext” strings. This can be very complicated and technical. But Weglot makes this easier through its intuitive, fast-loading, visual interface that lets you translate your WooCommerce store through a live preview of your store. It also automatically translates “gettext” strings for you.

• Access to translation data: Once you set your WooCommerce translations, the language files are stored on the same server as the rest of your website files. This can lead to a slower store and a risk of losing all your translations. With Weglot, your translation files are stored on the Weglot server, giving you ownership, convenience, and no security issues or website speed impact.
• Catalog of supported languages: Don’t just focus on the languages you need to support now, but also the ones you might need in the future. Choose a multilingual WordPress plugin that can support a variety of languages. Weglot supports 110+ languages as well as custom languages, and it frequently adds new languages to its repertoire based on suggestions from its users.

• Completeness of translation: When you’re looking for a WordPress plugin for multiple languages, you want one that’s comprehensive. Weglot leaves no stone unturned here. It ensures that the whole purchase process is in the users’ native language. With Weglot, you can translate:
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  - The shop page, cart pages and check-out pages
  - Custom text and strings generated by WordPress and WooCommerce
  - Text added by themes and add-ons, e.g. review plugin, popups and page builders
  - Single product and other pages
  - Any widgets, including the cart widget
  - Product categories and tags
  - Emails sent by WooCommerce
  - Moreover, it will also translate any page you add to your online store automatically and instantly.
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• Support for multilingual SEO: The right WooCommerce translation plugin also helps you get more traffic from search engines. This is because instead of one default language, now you can target the non-English search queries you were missing out on before. Weglot helps you optimize your pages for SEO like the meta titles of your posts, pages, and products, meta descriptions, image captions, and more. You’ll have a solid foundation for SEO. Plus, it automatically creates a subdirectory for each target language and adds hreflang tags to the source code to help search engines understand your translations.

• Speed and accuracy of results: Speeding up the translation process usually involves some compromise on quality and completeness. That’s why your translation plugin of choice should be able to translate fast and handle different languages, along with delivering satisfactory translations. When you set up Weglot, it automatically translates your current pages or any pages you add with leading machine translation providers including Google Translate, DeepL, and Microsoft. Weglot also gives you the ability to make changes to any area or page as desired. All you need to do is go to the translations tab of your Weglot account and start reviewing and making manual translations where required.

• Affordability and pricing model: As you consider different WooCommerce translation solutions, you’ll see variations in their costs and pricing models. Weglot provides flexible pricing plans for companies with different needs and budgets, as well as a free version
• Ease of team collaboration: Weglot lets you add team members to your account, so they can all work together cohesively on each translation project and make edits where needed.

5 Best WooCommerce Multilingual Plugins 

Now that you’ve learned what to look for in a WooCommerce multilingual plugin, let’s take a look at some of the best options avalable today.

1. Weglot

Connecting with any website technology, Weglot removes the complexity of going multilingual and allows you to translate, manage, and fully edit your website in the easiest way possible. 

Packed with a myriad of unique features, Weglot will not only help you translate your website, but it will also keep the same voice tone whilst adding SEO value to it.

These are some of the key features you can expect from Weglot:

• More than a 110 languages to choose from.
• Optimized translation with top-notch multilingual SEO practices for optimal organic impact.
• Automatic content detection and translation ensure you never waste time on manual tasks when new content is added to your site.
• Complete editorial control over translations through an intuitive dashboard.
• Manage your website translation project without the need for coding.
• Improve your bounce rate by automatically serving pages in your visitors' preferred language based on their browser settings using Weglot's visitors auto-redirection feature.
• Translate key conversion steps, including lead generation forms, pop-ups, and email confirmations, ensuring a localized customer journey.

Pricing

Weglot offers a free version, with paid plans starting at €15 per month depending on your needs. The most popular paid plan is priced at €79 a month and allows you to manage up to 3 websites, with 5 translated languages available, and the majority of the perks available. These include multilingual SEO, AI translation, access to pro translators, and up to 200,000 translation requests per month.

2. WPML

WPML is a versatile plugin for creating multilingual websites that integrates with WooCommerce through its dedicated extension. WPML simplifies translation management for eCommerce businesses looking to cater to global audiences.

Some of its key features include:

• Automatically identifying and translating WooCommerce products, items, and modules.
• Consistently preserving the selected or native language during the entire checkout process.
• Simplified interpretation of classes, items, and attributes.
• Delivering messages to users and customers in their preferred or native translated language.
• Employing various currencies based on the user's location.
• Flexible currency formatting options available.

Pricing

WPML offers a Multilingual CMS plan at €99 per year, providing support and updates for one year. This plan covers three production sites and nine development sites. The WooCommerce Multilingual & Multicurrency module is now available as a free standalone plugin through the WordPress repository, offering multicurrency features and configurations even if WPML is not installed.

3. Polylang

Polylang for WooCommerce is used in combination with WooCommerce and Polylang. It empowers you to translate essential elements like product pages, tags, categories, and grouped products with ease. 

Its standout features include:

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• Automatic translation for WooCommerce pages, categories, and variables.
• CSV import/export compatibility for efficient data management.
• Native language emails to enhance customer communication.
• Compatibility with popular SEO plugins.
• Synchronization of stock and prices for multilingual storefronts.
• Integration with key WooCommerce extensions for expanded functionality.

Pricing

Polylang for WooCommerce offers a free version, while the premium Pro version starts at €99. However, many of its top-quality features become available if you decide to purchase its business package, which is available at €139.00.

4. GTranslate

GTranslate simplifies the process of making your WordPress website multilingual. Leveraging the power of Google Translate, you can easily make any HTML website multilingual. GTranslate can translate your content, product pages, blogs, and shortcodes into over 100 languages from around the world.

Key features of the GTranslate plugin include:

• Access to free machine or neural translation, with premium plans available.
• Extensive language support.
• Manual translation editing via an inline editor.
• Indexing of translated pages for improved search engine visibility.
• Separate domains for different languages and translated URLs.
• Detailed analytics for usage insights.
• Regular updates and reliable support.

Pricing

You can start using GTranslate for free or opt for premium plans, starting at $9.99 per month and going up to $39.99 for enterprise-level subscriptions. The free plan still supports all languages and offers machine translation for unlimited words, but it excludes significant features such as URL translation, search engine indexing, and the ability to edit your translations.

5. TranslatePress

TranslatePress is a popular WooCommerce multilingual plugin that facilitates content translation. Its features and functionalities include:

• Full compatibility with an array of themes and page builders.
• Comprehensive integration with WooCommerce.
• Simultaneous translation of your entire online store, including page builder forms and shortcodes.
• Support for over 200 languages, allowing website translation using Google Translate or DeepL (separate costs apply for the use of these translation providers).
• Easy translation of WooCommerce forms and shortcodes through additional modules.
• Dedicated customer service team for prompt assistance.

Pricing

TranslatePress offers a free Lite version for download, and you can access premium features with the Premium version, starting at $7.99 per month.

How To Create a Multilingual WooCommerce Store (Tutorial)

Now that you’ve seen some of the top WooCommerce translation plugins, we’ll show you how to create a multilingual store using the Weglot plugin.

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. Create a Weglot account by signing up.
2. Find and install the Weglot plugin on WordPress. Log in to your WordPress.org website and head over to Plugins > Add New. Search for the Weglot plugin and install and activate it.

3. Add your languages. You’ll now see you have a Weglot tab on your WordPress Dashboard. Click on it to finalize adding your languages. First add your API key, you can access this from your Weglot Dashboard, under ‘Settings’ > ‘Setup’. Then select the original language your WooCommerce store is currently in. Choose the language(s) you want to translate your WooCommerce store into. Click Save to proceed.

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And that’s it! Your WooCommerce store is now 100% translated. 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.

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.

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.

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

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

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. Translate page and post meta descriptions

Weglot integrates with the Yoast SEO plugin to translate content strings added by Yoast including meta descriptions.

Add a meta description to your page or post using Yoast, like so:

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.

4. 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.

5. 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.

Summary

Making your WooCommerce store multilingual can open up your website to the world and allow website visitors to browse your store in their preferred language.

We’ve seen how technical the process can be if you mix the multisite option with other translation plugins. But WooCommerce translation doesn’t have to be complicated. WooCommerce multilingual plugins such as Weglot take care of the whole process. It gives you the ultimate flexibility and speed without any complex workarounds, letting you create a multilingual store in minutes.

We also broke down the various features to look out for when picking your WooCommerce translation plugin including multilingual SEO, translations management, easy installation, speed issues, and so on.

If you’re ready to make your WooCommerce store multilingual, why not try Weglot’s 10-day free trial.

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