As a WooCommerce site owner, chances are you’re ready for the next step in the e-commerce journey – international expansion. Make sure consumers worldwide can understand your site’s content and purchase in their native currency with WPML and WooCommerce Multilingual.
To give consumers a fully multilingual experience, you need to do more than translate your product descriptions. There’s the matter of translating categories, variations, and strings from your theme and plugins. You’ll also need to keep e-commerce localization efforts in mind. This means offering different payment methods, depending on the language or location of your customers.
The good news is that translating a WooCommerce site with advanced features is simpler than it sounds. With WPML and the WooCommerce Multilingual add-on, you can easily translate all the elements of your e-commerce site, offer your products in different currencies, and more.
In this article, we’ll show you how easy it is to translate your WooCommerce site with WPML and version 5.0 of the WooCommerce Multilingual add-on. By the end of this tutorial, you’ll have a fully multilingual WooCommerce site with a language switcher and a currency switcher on each product page, like in the example below.
A fully translated product page on the front-end
Why Translate Your WooCommerce Site
By now, you know what the main advantage of translating your WooCommerce site is – reaching a larger audience and tapping into the global marketplace.
Let’s explore a few other benefits of having a multilingual WooCommerce store:
Improved User Experience. The majority of consumers worldwide prefer to shop in their native language. If you provide your users with a positive experience, they’re more likely to stick with your brand.
International Search Engine Optimization. With your site’s content optimized for multilingual SEO, you can rank higher on various search engine platforms and in different languages.
Increased Revenue. Accurate translations of your site’s content and checkout pages can help you reach new markets and provide customers with a smooth shopping experience. In turn, you can expect a smaller bounce rate and an increase in sales.
Why Choose WPML
Your WooCommerce site is made up of a number of elements. This includes:
Posts, pages, and products
Categories and tags
Product images and media
Cart and Checkout pages
Variations and attributes
To translate your WooCommerce site the right way, you need to choose a translation plugin that can handle all these types of content. You don’t want to risk having select pages and content partially translated, or for your visitors to have difficulty switching languages.
With WPML, you can translate your entire site automatically in minutes.
Or, you can translate products by yourself, either automatically or by manually inputting the translations.
Alternatively, you can add other users as translators or enlist the help of a professional translation service.
Multicurrency Features
Consumers don’t just prefer to shop in their own languages. They also need to shop in their own local currencies.
Aside from translating all your site’s content, WooCommerce Multilingual lets you display your product’s prices in different currencies, depending on the language or location of your customers. Additionally, you can choose between setting exchange rates manually or automatically.
You can also set specific payment gateways for each of your site’s currencies or based on the location of your customers. This is helpful if you want to enable a form of payment that is only available in a specific country.
Compatibility with WooCommerce Add-Ons
WooCommerce add-ons are plugins that can add more specific functionality to your online store. For example, you may want to sell memberships and subscriptions, or set up bookable products.
WPML’s WooCommerce Multilingual is compatible with a number of popular WooCommerce add-ons, making it possible to use one translation plugin for all the content on your WooCommerce site:
In order for your multilingual content to rank well in search engines, it first needs to be understood by them.
With WPML, you can create SEO-friendly URLs, translate “slugs”, and add language switchers that link translations to each other.
Additionally, WPML handles the technical side for you, like automatically injecting the hreflang links into content. This helps Google and other search engines understand and differentiate between the content in your default and secondary languages.
Getting Started with WooCommerce Multilingual
Now that you know why you should go multilingual, we’ll show you how to get there. Here’s what you need to install and activate on your site:
WooCommerce Multilingual add-on (Comes with your Multilingual CMS or Agency account. You can find the plugin in the Downloads section of your WPML account)
For the purposes of this tutorial, we’ll also install the WooCommerce Product Add-Ons extension to show you how easy it is to translate product pages with customized options.
We’ll assume you already have WPML installed and activated on your site. If you’re a first time WPML user and need more information on the setup process, check out our Getting Started Guide.
Installing and Configuring WooCommerce Multilingual
When you first activate WooCommerce Multilingual, you’ll be taken to the setup wizard. Go through the steps to create the missing translations for your store pages, set up the multicurrency mode, and decide on a translation mode.
WooCommerce Multilingual setup wizard
While we recommend going through the setup wizard, you can configure your settings at a later time in WooCommerce → WooCommerce Multilingual & Multicurrency.
Setting Up the Multi-Currency Features
You can enable the Multicurrency mode in two places:
In the setup wizard
By going to WooCommerce → WooCommerce Multilingual & Multicurrency and entering the Multicurrrency tab
You can choose to display multiple currencies either based on language or based on your customer’s location. We’ll walk you through how to show currencies based on language:
Go to WooCommerce → WooCommerce Multilingual & Multicurrency and click the Multicurrency tab.
In the Currencies section, select the option to Show currencies based on: Site Language.
A table displaying your site's languages and a Default currency will appear. To add more currencies, click on the Add currency button. Use the drop-down menu to select a currency and then manually set the exchange rate.
Adding a new currency to your WooCommerce site
If you want, you can customize the way the currency is displayed by clicking the pencil icon next to CurrencyPreview. When you’re done, click the Save button.
Customizing the way the currency is displayed
In the Defaultcurrency section of the table, you can choose which currency your users will first see on the front-end when switching languages. Select Keep if you want your users to see the same currency before and after they switch languages. Or, use the dropdown menu to select a different currency. If you don’t want a currency to be displayed for a particular language, uncheck the box next to it in the table.
Choosing which currencies to display for each language
For the purpose of this tutorial, we’ve created a WooCommerce store selling plants and added three currencies to it. Using the WooCommerce Product Add-Ons extension, we added a per-product add-on to specific products.
WPML’s Translate Everything mode automatically translates your entire store’s content and then keeps the translations up to date anytime you make a change or add new content. This includes posts and pages, products, categories, attributes. and other taxonomies. You can review the translations before publishing them to make sure they’re accurate.
Translating content automatically with the Translate Everything mode
On the other hand, you may want to have more control over which products you translate or who translates them. In this case, you can choose the Translate Some mode.
To translate a product yourself using Translate Some mode:
Go to WooCommerce → WooCommerce Multilingual & Multicurrency. In the Products tab, click the plus icon next to the language you want to translate your product into.
Clicking the plus icon to translate a product
The Advanced Translation Editor opens. As you can see, all the content related to the product is available for translation. This includes the product title, description, category, and custom add-on fields from the WooCommerce Product Add-Ons extension. If you have translation credits, you can translate the content automatically. If not, enter the translations for each line manually. Click Complete when you’re done.
Translating a product in the Advanced Translation Editor
That’s it! Take a look at your translated product page, equipped with a language switcher and currency switcher, on the front-end:
Product page in default language
Product page in secondary language
Wrapping Up
Translating your WooCommerce site can be simple – so long as you choose a translation plugin that ticks all the boxes.
With WPML and the WooCommerce Multilingual add-on, you can do more than translate your website. You can also provide your customers with a fully localized experience by adding multiple currencies to your store and setting different payment gateways for each currency.
Plus, WPML’s WooCommerce Multilingual is fully compatible with a number of popular WooCommerce extensions, making it possible to use one translation plugin for all your WooCommerce store’s content.
