Iconic plugins can help you add all kinds of functionality to your WooCommerce store. But having functionality isn’t enough – you also need potential customers to take advantage of that functionality!

If you want people to add products to their wishlists, or choose delivery slots, you need to find a way to get shoppers to your store in the first place and keep them on your site and happy once they get there.

While there are all kinds of strategies to do that, one oft-overlooked method is making your store available in different languages.

In this post, we’ll dig into the benefits of going multilingual for your store. Then, we’ll show you how to use a WordPress language translation plugin to create a multilingual WooCommerce store, including the ability to translate all of Iconic’s plugins.

We’ll use Iconic’s Wishlists for WooCommerce plugin as an example, but the same basic principles apply no matter which WooCommerce extensions you’re using. Let’s get started.

How Does a WordPress Language Translation Plugin Help Your Store?

There are a few different benefits to using a WordPress language translation plugin, for both “regular” sites and eCommerce stores.

Let’s start with the two big benefits for all WordPress sites, including eCommerce stores:

  1. Search engine optimization (SEO) and traffic
  2. User experience

Going Multilingual Opens Up New SEO Opportunities

When you have a monolingual WordPress site, your site’s content ranks in Google for one language.

But here’s the thing:

People search Google in their own native language most of the time! So there are lots of people who are searching for the exact same content/products that you offer…just in a different language.

By going multilingual, you can start reaching those people in search engines without the need to create “new” content (that is, you’re just translating your existing content or products, rather than creating new ideas).

For example, look at how Etsy translates their product archive pages into Spanish to get a chance to rank them in Google, even though the products themselves might not be written in Spanish:

language translation website

You can apply that same strategy to start bringing in more visitors to your WooCommerce store.

To get an idea of how big your potential audience might be in different languages, you can use the Google Market Finder tool. Or, most SEO research tools let you segment by language.

Going Multilingual Provides a Better Experience for Visitors

Beyond helping you reach new visitors in the first place, going multilingual also helps you offer a better experience for your existing (and future) customers.

See, as you’d expect, most people prefer to browse websites in their native language.

According to a survey commissioned by the European Commission, around 90% of those surveyed always prefer to visit a website in their own language when available. And 45% of respondents just flat out won’t use a website in a language other than their own.

This preference is especially important because we live in a multilingual world even within geographic areas. For example, the US Census Bureau estimates that 21.6% of US people age five and above speak a language other than English at home, and that number jumps to a whopping 44.6% in California alone.

So, even if you aren’t seeking a global audience, you still might have a multilingual audience! And those are people who will still want to book deliveries, use their wishlist, interact with product variations, etc.

To get an idea of which languages your visitors speak, you can use the Language report in Google Analytics:

language translation woocommerce

Going Multilingual Benefits eCommerce, Too

Beyond the general benefits above, using a WordPress language translation plugin can also pay dividends for your WooCommerce store.

Essentially, the same idea that people prefer to browse the web in their native languages also applies to eCommerce shopping.

From that same Gallup survey above, 42% of respondents said they never buy products from a store in a different language.

So if you ship globally – or even if you just sell in a multilingual area – you might be missing out on sales from people who don’t speak the language used at your store.

By using a WordPress language translation plugin, you’re able to let that 42% of people shop in their preferred language(s).

What to Look for in a WordPress Language Translation Plugin

When you’re looking for a WordPress language translation plugin to create a multilingual store, you’ll want to consider a few important questions:

  • How does the plugin translate content? Does it use automatic machine translation? Will you need to manually translate content? Can you do both?
  • Will the WordPress language translation plugin work with my store? You’ll want a plugin that fully integrates with WooCommerce, as well as all the many WooCommerce extension plugins you might be using.
  • Is it SEO friendly? If you want to benefit from multilingual SEO, you’ll need a plugin that creates fully-indexable, SEO-friendly versions of each language.

If you want something that ticks those boxes, the Weglot WordPress language translation plugin is a good choice that lets you both use automatic machine translation and manually manage and refine your translations.

It also lets you translate 100% of your WordPress content, including your theme, plugins (yes – Iconic plugins, too), and WooCommerce products, as well as implementing important multilingual SEO principles.

How to Use a WordPress Language Translation Plugin

If you want to use the Weglot WordPress language translation plugin, here’s a quick guide for how to set it up and use it to translate both your regular WordPress content, as well as content from any one of Iconic’s WooCommerce plugins:

  1. Register for a Weglot account and copy your API key
  2. Install the Weglot plugin at your WordPress site and add the API key
  3. Choose your site’s current language and the language into which you want to translate your content
  4. Adjust the default language switcher that Weglot adds, if desired

Once you’ve activated the plugin, users will be able to start browsing your machine translations right away – here’s an example:

IconicWP

How to Manage Your Site’s Translations

To help you manage your site’s translations, the Weglot WordPress language translation plugin gives you two different interfaces.

First, there’s the Translations List interface, which gives you a side-by-side look at the original text and the translation:

wordpress language translation Iconicwp

Then, for a more visual approach to translation management, you can use the Visual Editor.

With this interface, you’ll see a live view of the front-end of your site. To edit a translation, all you do is hover over the text you want to translate and click the green pencil icon.

For example, here’s what it looks like to translate the button from Iconic’s Wishlists for WooCommerce plugin:

wordpress language translation

Once you click the pencil icon, it will open a popup where you can edit the translation:

 translation plugin

You’ll be able to follow the exact same approach to translate any other Iconic plugin, including:

Get Started With a WordPress Language Translation Plugin Today!

If you’re running an eCommerce store powered by WooCommerce and Iconic, using a multilingual language translation plugin offers three big benefits:

  1. It lets visitors browse your store in their preferred languages, which is what 90%+ of people want.
  2. You can rank your store for Google search queries in new languages, which opens up a big new source for traffic.
  3. You’ll be able to convert the ~42% of shoppers who never buy products from stores in a different language.

To translate your WooCommerce store, you can use the Weglot WordPress language translation plugin to get up and running in just a few minutes.

Get started today and create your own multilingual store!