Translating any client website is almost an essential need. Given the reach of the web, there is lots of value in making sure your client’s content is accessible to any visitor who hits your site. What’s more, WordPress offers a number of ways to translate your WooCommerce store – all you need is to choose the right solution.
Most of the time, this will be through a plugin. While there are a few on the market, you’ll want to make sure the translation service is easy to use, and easy on the wallet. Not all plugins are equal though, so you’ll want to weigh up the features and functionality of each one you come across.
Why You’d Want to Translate a WooCommerce Store
A WooCommerce store, as you know, is much like any website as it has a potential global audience to capture. This means a site in only one language won’t be able to provide the same experience to speakers of other languages.
However, this is only one benefit of turning a monolingual store into a multilingual one:
Your clients can reach a greater number of customers – the ‘numbers game’ is in full effect here, as the more visitors that hit the site, the better your chance of converting some of them. It’s a good idea to create specific regional content, and this gives your clients the opportunity to build trust and loyalty. For instance, if they promote a Cinco de Mayo campaign, they can create content for Mexican website visitors.
There are plenty more benefits, but the lure of more customers, a greater number of sales, and a boost to brand loyalty is tempting. However, the translation process is not always smooth.
Some of the Roadblocks Experienced During a Manual Translation Process
You might be tempted to translate a WooCommerce store using a more manual process.
However, there are a few drawbacks to this approach that can hinder or even negatively impact your multilingual strategy:
You’ll need to translate every piece of content on your site to have an effect. This includes metadata, archives, URLs, image ‘alt’ texts, and more.
A manual approach can see you miss some of these key facets. Some multilingual aspects, such as ‘hreflang’ tags, are complex and require good technical knowledge to implement.
You might not have these skills, nor the foresight to maintain and troubleshoot the implementation. Your time is costs your client money, and a manual translation can eat away at it. This is especially true if you carry out the translation process yourself. If you choose to use a professional translator, you’ll need a healthy budget too.
On the whole, you’ll need a strong strategy in place, and it might not be one that manual translation can provide. Instead, it’s a good idea to use a solid WordPress translation plugin for the job.
Introducing Weglot
You’ll want to look into a suitable WordPress translation plugin in order to make the site multilingual. One such highly rated plugin is Weglot.
At its core, Weglot covers all the essential features and functionality you need to translate a WooCommerce store:
Weglot detects, translates, and displays the content of a website instantly under language subdirectories.
You won’t need any code to use Weglot.
The entire platform is a no-code solution.
You’ll have a first layer of machine translation which you can then choose to manually edit.
Weglot detects all of the content on an automatic basis – even content that is added in the future so the site will always be 100% translated.
Your clients will be able to use the Weglot Dashboard to manage all of their translations and also choose to view them through a visual editor.
What’s more, your client won’t have to worry about implementing some of the more technical elements, such as hreflang tags. Weglot does all this for them.
How Weglot Can Help You Translate Your WooCommerce Store
Once you have a registered Weglot plan, you can translate your site in minutes. The first step is to install the WordPress plugin and enter your API key into the relevant field on the Weglot > Main configuration screen:
Select the original language of the website and the languages you want to translate it into (destination languages) and click save. That’s it! Your WooCommerce store is translated.
From here, you can then choose to edit the design and position of your language switcher, among a whole host of other options:
From there, you can move to the Weglot Dashboard:
There are a number of translation management actions you can make through your Weglot Dashboard including creating a glossary of terms, excluding certain pages or blocks from translation, translating slugs, and many more things.
Here we take a closer look at the Translations list. This is where you’ll see all of the current translations for your site:
If you click through to a specific translation, you’ll see your translations side-by-side:
Weglot provides an automatic translation of all of your content. This machine translation is also something you can edit if you want to. It’s possible here, and through the Translations > Visual Editor screen:
This takes you to a live preview of your website where you can make edits in context.
With Weglot, your WooCommerce store including your checkout, products and descriptions are all translated so your potential customers can understand 100% of the buying experience. Conclusion To bring in new customers and give them a great experience, you’ll want to translate your WooCommerce store. This could be a difficult endeavor but doesn’t have to be if you use a suitable WordPress translation plugin.
Comments