Website localization refers to the process of adapting your original website to your new target audience based on language, design, and cultural factors. 

It’s so effective that the Localization Industry Standards Association (LISA) found that, on average, every €1 spent on localizing your website yields €25 in return.

While language makes up a large part of the website localization process, brands looking to enter global markets must go beyond translation to ensure they communicate effectively and meaningfully. 

This includes paying particular attention to cultural differences, language nuances, website internationalization, and even payment methods. 

Combine all these factors together, and you’ll improve the overall user experience for your target markets and make your foreign market entry as smooth as possible.  

Read on for guidance on how to manage your website localization project effectively. But first, why should you put your marketing efforts into website localization when looking to go global?

Benefits of Website Localization

Entering New Markets

The goal of website localization is to enter new markets effectively. If you fail to follow the steps detailed below, you’re unlikely to infiltrate the local market with the same success as your home market, as you’ll appear alien to new website visitors. 

Improving User Experience

A localized website means that, no matter the language, all information is displayed properly and according to the visitors’ context.

For example, shoppers interested in your products will be put off if they can’t purchase in their local currency or use their preferred payment method. 

Building Customer Loyalty

People are most loyal to businesses and services that they feel care about them and their needs.

Interacting with “Faceless MegaCorp (TM)” won’t inspire loyalty. But interacting with an ecommerce brand that understands local customs, holidays, and other quirks will feel much more right and encourage customers to return.

Increasing Your Revenue

With the right content localization strategy, you’ll have no trouble selling in new markets, to new and potential customers. This helps you optimize your business and grow your revenue.

With that in mind, let’s take a look at 6 actionable steps to streamline your website localization process.

1. Research Your Audience

The website localization process starts with a deep understanding of what your target audience wants from your product or service.  

Don’t rely on generalized data, as you won’t hit the mark when targeting your audience. It’s recommended to create buyer personas for each market, which you can do by asking the following questions:

• What are the demographics of the people buying your product?
• Is there a solid interest in your product here?
• What do they prefer buying?
• What’s the competitive landscape surrounding products like yours?
• Is your product affordable to your audience?
• How much will you have to spend on logistics here?

2. Build A Localization Strategy and Team

Now that you know what your target audience needs, it’s time to build your website localization strategy around it.

But what’s in a localization strategy? It includes how you plan to adapt your marketing, products, and services to a particular audience. Essentially, this is every touchpoint you’ll have with your audience.

Your research will have told you:

• the languages your target audience speaks
• the colloquial language and slang they use
• cultural and social norms
• the most relevant celebrities or figures
• pop culture references

Integrating this into your messaging and offering will tell your audience that you do, in fact, have a current pulse on what they engage with daily. Even better, your localization efforts show that you understand them better than other companies (foreign or local)

Let’s take a look at Coca-Cola’s global website:

And compare it to their Australian site:

Their global website had a general, over-arching message that could be applied to all their markets. But their Australian website used a clear image—bottles of Coca-Cola cooled by ice on hot, scorching sand—to put their product into the context of local culture. This established a clear association between their audience and ‘use cases’ for the product.

Organizing a Localization Team

Website localization can be notoriously complex. Putting together a team to streamline this process will undoubtedly improve your workflow. 

An example team could include linguists or translators, developers, designers, localization managers, QA engineers, marketers, and more and a breakdown of roles within a localization team could look like the following:

• A localization manager to oversee the overall project. Their goal is to delegate tasks, monitor the progress, and ensure everyone is on the same page
• A designer who can easily adapt your branding guidelines to your target audience, creating websites and designs that reflect a localized version of your brand
• Translators to improve the accuracy and relevance of your translated, localized content.
• Quality Assurance (QA) engineers who can thoroughly test your localized website and ensure it works properly.
• A customer support team that speaks the locale’s language; ideally, you’d have one in different regions per area you plan to target.

However, not everyone can afford to assemble a localization team, especially if you don’t have the numbers to confirm your potential for international growth. 

That’s where a website translation solution like Weglot can be helpful: you can localize your entire website for a fraction of the time and money you would spend on a traditional localization team.

Learn more about Weglot and how it can be implemented in your website localization strategy.

3. Website Translation

According to Nimdzi, 9 out of 10 international internet users will ignore your product if it isn’t in their local language.

And this isn’t simply because they can’t understand what’s being said. Even 60.6% of people with high proficiency in English would rather look up something online in their native language.

The key part of the process for your end user is a fully translated and displayed site for your global audience, which is an unavoidable step in the process. Adding multiple languages to your site will be determined by the initial research you carried out. 

But what’s the best way to translate your website content, and how can you ensure your site copy is as natural in your original language as in your target language?

There are 3 types of translation methods to consider. 

Machine Translation

This method of translation allows you to translate your site without needing human intervention. It might be quick, but its results are less accurate. Leading machine translation providers include Google Translate, DeepL, and Microsoft, which provide high-quality translation output. AI translation and automatic translation also fall under this umbrella.

Human Translation

Also known as manual translation, this translation method requires the full input of a human being. This is typically done by a professional translator, a linguist, or a native speaker, sourced through translation services. While high in accuracy, this method can be costly and time-consuming.

Machine + Human Translation

Here, you’ll have the best of both worlds. This is often done by using a first layer of machine translation and then having a human edit the output until it reaches the desired level of accuracy.

Alongside the actual words on your site, you’ll need to pay particular attention to other website UX and UI factors, including:

• Adapting images, videos, graphics, and even emojis 😉 to resonate with the target culture
• Fine-tuning content to suit cultural, religious, or general preferences
• Modifying website design, layout, and formatting to allow for translated texts that read from right to left
• Offering pricing in local currencies and numbers in local units of measure
• Localizing date formats and phone numbers
• Using the correct naming conventions, as different languages put first and last names in different orders
• Adhering to local regulations and legal requirements

4. Choose the Right Translation Management System

Many localization mistakes are made when using the wrong tools. After all, when you have translated and localized versions of your website, you’ll have a lot of content to manage and update. 

If you update the information in one language, you’ll also have to do the same for your target language. 

That’s why having the right translation management system (TMS) is crucial to your success. It will simplify your translation workflow and remove the back-and-forth between your marketing team and your developer.

It will also automate many repetitive tasks, helping you save time and money and allowing you to focus on other parts of your localization strategy. 

Key features to look for in a website translation tool include:

• Content detection: One time-consuming part of website translation is gathering all the content on your site. Using a website translation tool that automatically does this step for you will streamline your localization workflow, plus remove the potential of human error, leading to untranslated pages. Weglot works by detecting, translating and displaying 100% of your website’s content, including dynamic content, and metadata tags. 
• In-context translation: Choose a TMS with in-context translation editing features, like Weglot’s Visual Editor, so you can make real-time changes on a live preview of your site.

• Import/export translations: This feature is handy when using professional translation or localization services that prefer working with files. Export the file and send it to your translators, then reimport them back onto your website, and it’ll automatically push it live.
• Collaborative features: Your localization team should have access to your project to edit or fine-tune changes as needed. A TMS with proper collaborative functions makes it seamless to add project members to manage your translations more easily.
• Glossaries and translation exclusions: Glossaries allow you to translate certain phrases or words (such as your brand name) the same way across your website, or set rules to ensure certain words are never translated, etc. This keeps your translated content consistent. 
• Translation memory speeds up your project, as similar phrases and frequently used terms can always be translated the same way, cutting down on the required edits. 

This is exactly how Weglot handles the translation, localization and internationalization of your website. Learn more about how Weglot works and try it for yourself with a 10-day free trial, no commitment.

5. Keyword Research

Once you’ve translated your site, the next step is to consider keyword research and search engine optimization. International SEO is crucial in ensuring your localized site is visible on global search engines.

You can do this through keyword translation. Understanding what keywords your audience is searching for will improve your global rankings. This is why like-for-like website translation cannot always work and where international keyword research plays a role. 

You’ll need to find the exact terms your target audience uses. The process can look something like:

1. Identify your keywords
2. Translate your keywords
3. Localize your translated keywords
4. Check the viability of your localized keywords 

"We looked at ad campaigns for our client targeting Norway, and there was more of a focus in English," AS Marketing's Leigh Buttrey explained when describing how they did their own international keyword research during the International Marketing Summit 2024. "We found that while Norwegian keywords had a low search volume, we had the competitor advantage here. And these keywords converted a lot more than the English ones because we're gaining that trust."

6. Multilingual Website Design

There are several aspects you’ll need to pay attention to on your translated sites. 

For starters, text expansion and contraction—where the equivalent of a word or sentence in another language is significantly longer or shorter than the source text—tends to move around the design elements of your web pages.

The result is an awkward page with text or media in places they shouldn’t be, harming your UX and likely increasing bounce rates. You’ll have put off potential customers before they’ve even had the chance to check out your offering. 

That’s why accounting for multilingual design is crucial to localizing your website. Let’s take Facebook as a good example. Here’s their design for languages that read left to right, like English, German, Indonesian, and more:

Now look at Facebook’s website for Arabic users:

It completely flipped the design to better accommodate right-to-left alphabets, like Arabic. 

Your translated content won’t successfully reach your intended audience if you don’t also account for your user experience (UX) and interface (UI)!

Visitors who navigate your website should have the smoothest experience possible. Your localization efforts will impact this since the UI elements will differ per language.

Depending on your target language and audience, you may need to use other emojis and color combinations to avoid potentially offensive cultural associations. It’s also recommended to adapt your images, especially those representing people, to those that more accurately reflect the different countries you’re targeting. 

Let’s take a look at Clarins’ website. The French version features a Caucasian woman.

But on the Japanese version of the site, the women featured are clearly of East Asian descent, resonating with the website visitors.

7. Website Internationalization

Website internationalization is the process of ensuring your website is technically ready to host and display the proper translated content to your target audience.

It involves more than fully translating your website into your target audience’s preferred language. For example, it involves correctly displaying naming conventions, currencies, and date formats.

Here’s what you need to consider when internationalizing your website:

1. Site Architecture

You’ll need to configure your website architecture to ensure that search engines pick up on the different language versions of your website and treat them separately from your main website. Otherwise, they’ll treat them as duplicates, harming your visibility on search engine results.

2. URL Structure

The right URL structure for your website tells search engines like Google to present that site to a specific audience in a specific country, enabling you to target them effectively.

Here are some URL structures to choose from:

• country code top-level domain (ccTLD)
• example: yourwebsite.fr, which has a French ccTLD
• a subdomain, a subdirectory, or subfolder
• Subdomain example: fr.yourwebsite.com
• Subdirectory/subfolder example: yourwebsite.com/fr/
• or using a completely different domain name
• Example: examplefr.com  

3. Hreflang Tags

Adding hreflang tags to your source code is indispensable to internationalizing your website. They’re HTML attributes search engines use to determine the geographic area and language the page is intended for. They look like this:<<link rel="alternate" href="https://www.abc.com/" hreflang="en" />Try searching for “Nike official website” in the UK. The first result will bring you to https://www.nike.com/gb/.

They’re meant to ensure that search engines serve you with the most relevant page, tailored to your language and geographic location. After all, you wouldn’t want search engines to serve the Chinese version of your website to a Spanish speaker in Argentina.

Next Steps: Get Started with Weglot

Website localization doesn’t need to be scary. With the right tools by your side, the process can be a lot quicker and more efficient than you thought. 

With Weglot as your website localization solution, you can enter new non-English international markets and scale faster.

Thanks to its automation, you can say goodbye to manual work and juggling Excel sheets. Weglot helps you with content localization through easy website translation management, automatic content detection, and localization.

The best part is that you don’t necessarily have to burn a hole in your pocket or hire expensive linguists. All you need is the URL of your website to get started!

Read further for pro tips on localization

We’re not done yet! Here’s some important further reading to help you take your content localization strategy one step ahead:

• 5 things you didn’t know you should localize
• How to improve your localization strategy in 2024
• 5 website localization issues to avoid
• 5 examples of multilingual websites that inspire

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