Did you know that 40% of online shoppers will never buy from a store that does not offer their language?
Also, a whopping 76% of buyers say they prefer to purchase products in their native language.
Yes, this is what research tells us. These figures point to a significant opportunity for owners of WooCommerce stores.
Going multilingual does more than just localize your content; it also boosts customer satisfaction, builds trust, and opens up new markets for your store. As such, follow this guide to create a multilingual WooCommerce store with TranslatePress.
Why Should You Make Your WooCommerce Store Multilingual?
Your WooCommerce store might be getting traffic, but have you ever checked where your visitors come from?
For many businesses, a big slice of potential customers arrives from outside their main market.
The problem? If your store speaks only one language, most of those visitors leave without buying.
A multilingual store solves that. It doesn’t just help people understand your products, it makes them feel like you built the store for them. That means:
- Increased trust: When customers understand every step of the process, they are much more likely to enter their payment information.
- Reduced cart abandonment: One of the main causes of lost sales is confusion at checkout.
- Increased SEO reach: Each translated product page can rank in a different language, which can lead to new markets.
In other words, going multilingual is less about “translation” and more about unlocking growth. You’re giving your products a passport to compete in other markets without creating separate stores.
Why Choose TranslatePress for Your Multilingual WooCommerce?
One of the easiest ways to translate your WooCommerce store is with TranslatePress, which is also one of the most user-friendly options.
Here’s why:
- You can translate your store right from the front end using the Visual Translation Editor.
- Use AI translations to expedite your workflow with TranslatePress AI.
- You can start from scratch or manually edit translations produced by AI for total control.
- It gives you the possibility to improve SEO & search visibility by translating slugs, metadata, and more.
- Works with products, shop pages, checkout pages, emails, dynamic strings and more.
Step-by-Step Guide to Translating Your WooCommerce Store
Here’s a step-by-step you can follow to start a multilingual WooCommerce store:
Step 1: Install and Configure TranslatePress
Before we translate anything, we need to set up the plugin.
Head to your WordPress dashboard → Plugins → Add New. Next, search for “TranslatePress” and click Install Now → Activate.
The plugin works out of the box with WooCommerce, so no extra setup is needed to get started.
Step 2: Set Your Languages
Now it’s time to choose your default and the additional language you want (P.S. with a premium license, you can add an unlimited number of languages to your website).
To do so, simply go to Settings → TranslatePress → General.
First, set up your default website language. Then, add the additional language(s) in the section below.
Step 3. Enable TranslatePress AI (Optional but Powerful)
If you would rather set all your translations up manually, you can skip this step and go straight to the next step.
However, if you want to save time and translate your whole website in just a few clicks, this step is the right solution for you. TranslatePress AI can automatically translate your entire store in minutes.
Just go to Settings → Automatic Translation and enable automatic translation.
In this dedicated section, TranslatePress AI will be selected as your default translation engine. If you have a premium license active on your site, your AI words quota will be displayed here.
But if not, you can still get a free TranslatePress AI license with 2,000 words included for translation.
Once TranslatePress Ai is active, hit Save at the bottom of the page, and your website will be instantly translated on the front-end, within the word limit included in your license.
Now, if you feel like tweaking some of these translations, you can always manually edit them in the visual translation editor I will present below.
Step 4. Manually Edit Translations
If you prefer to have full control over your translations, you can manually do so with each page, description or element of your WooCommerce store.
4.1. Shop Page
First, let’s take the Shop page as an example:
- Navigate to your Shop page on the front-end.
- Click on “Translate Page” from the Admin bar.
- Use the visual Translation Editor to click directly on any string you want to translate.
- Enter your translated text in the translation editor on the left side of the screen. Hit Save.
4.2. Product Page
For a product page, for example, the process is much the same way:
- Navigate to your Product page on the front-end.
- Click on “Translate Page” from the Admin bar.
- Use the visual Translation Editor to click directly on any string you want to translate.
- Enter your translated text and hit Save.
There may be situations when you need to display different product images for different languages. The visual Translation Editor can be used for product image translation, as well.
4.3. Cart & Checkout Pages
Next, let’s translate the cart and checkout pages.
Mind you that you need to translate your WooCommerce cart two times:
- When it’s empty, no items added to the cart.
- When it’s filled, one or more items added to their cart.
This is because the content on your empty cart page is most probably different than the content displayed when the cart is full.
- First, you can translate the full cart. From the front end of your site, simply add a product to your cart and then go to the cart page.
- Once there, click the Translate Page button, and start clicking around to add your translations, just like I already showed you on the other pages:
- Next, you’ll want to translate the empty state, as your cart page probably displays some custom message when it is empty.
For this, all you have to do is remove the product/s from your cart. You can do this without even closing the translation editor. Simply remove the product in the right-side preview and let the cart page reload in the empty state.
You’ll now be able to see the message that your page displays when the cart is empty, and translate it just like all the other content so far:
To finish things out, you’re now ready to translate the WooCommerce checkout page.
You can use the same approach: go to the checkout page on the front-end of your site and click the Translate Page option on the toolbar. That will open the visual Translation Editor:
Once again, you can also do this without ever leaving the translation editor, by simply navigating the website preview.
4.4. Dynamic/Gettext Strings
When translating your WooCommerce store, you might come across some strings that already have available translations, even if you haven’t added them yourself.
Now, since WooCommerce is such a popular plugin, they provide translations themselves for the default strings that come with the plugin for most popular languages.
These are the elements that WooCommerce adds automatically and can’t be edited directly from the product page, such as the Add to Cart button or the billing fields on the checkout page.
They are called gettext strings, and they can’t be edited like the normal text you add to a page manually. Normally, if you want to edit these, you would need to modify these within your theme or plugin files.
However, TranslatePress allows you to edit strings coming from plugins too. This means you can both translate them into any language you wish, and edit the original string if you don’t like how it sounds.
Simply hover over these types of strings and click on the pencil icon. You’ll notice that for these strings, the pencil icon appears in green, indicating that the string is dynamic and comes from a theme or plugin.
Besides this, additional fields appear in the left sidebar, including one for your default language.
This is particularly useful because it lets you adjust strings that are hardcoded into WooCommerce. So, if you’re not happy with the default wording, you can easily replace it here.
Some strings, such as those inside drop-down menus, can’t be accessed in the usual way.
In these cases, you can use the sidebar menu instead. There, you’ll find all the content added to the page by plugins and themes. Be sure to review the full list to ensure you don’t miss any strings.
4.5. WooCommerce Emails
WooCommerce emails are those automatic messages your store sends like order confirmations, shipping details, or password resets.
Translating them matters because it makes sure your customers get clear, friendly updates in their own language, which builds trust and avoids confusion.
- Until now, you worked with the visual Translation Editor. But for now, switch to the String Translation tab from the left side of the screen. That’s what you’ll need to use to translate your emails sent through WooCommerce.
- Next, click on the Emails tab, then choose WooCommerce in the Filter by domain dropdown and click the Filter button.
- To edit the translation of a specific string, simply click on the Edit button under it and input your translations.
Step 5. Don’t Forget About SEO
SEO is crucial when opting for a multilingual WooCommerce. Simply translating your on-page content doesn’t guarantee that Google will serve those pages to international audiences too. However, translating the SEO metadata of those pages, will.
The SEO pack add-on, included in the premium version lets you translate page SEO titles, meta descriptions, URL slugs and more. These elements help search engines understand and rank your content in different languages, so it’s definitely a must-have.
In other words, by translating this data, you can reach people searching for products like yours in other languages too.
- To enable the add-on, all you have to do is go to Settings → TranslatePress → Addons, and click on Activate near the SEO Pack add-on.
Once that’s on, now you can translate all the meta information on your website (as long as it’s properly set up in the original language).
To do so, go to the front-end of your website and open the visual Translation Editor. Open the String List and manually translate each string under the Meta Information section, just like any other string.
Ready to Go Global with WooCommerce?
Adding multilingual support to your WooCommerce store is not merely a nice-to-have; it’s one of the best business-growth strategies you can implement.
Speaking to clients in their native tongue allows you to establish trust right away, break down barriers to purchase, and access whole new markets.
The good news? You don’t have to spend weeks on intricate setups or be a developer.
Whether you prefer to fine-tune everything manually for maximum accuracy or want quick, AI-powered translations to get started quickly, now you know how to do it.
