Giles Thomas, Author at Acquire Convert

FREE WEBINAR: Join Gorgias, Weglot & Whole. in this live video training: Shopify Internationalization: Store Translation, Advertising & Multi-Language Support

Some merchants cottoned on to this a long time ago. Many US stores offer Spanish versions of their sites and Canadian stores offer French. But what about Chinese? Japanese? German? Italian?

There’s no easy way to cater to all these different nationalities – or is there?

Weglot is a translation service app that can transform an entire website in minutes from a unilingual site into a multilingual one – saving you the costs of having to build completely new and separate websites for different languages.

Our Weglot review takes a look at how this simple translation tool might help your store join a more global stage…

What is Weglot and how does it work?

Weglot promises to “make your website multilingual in minutes and to manage all your translations effortlessly.”

That’s a big call. But it appears to be living up to its goals if the thousands of Shopify merchants who use it are to be believed (more about that below).

The app simplifies translations on your website, managing all translation options in one place instead of having to use multiple tools.

It adds a language switcher button on your website and lets you translate content without any new coding required.

The great beauty of Weglot besides its simplicity is that you get so many options. Not only does it cover practically any language you could wish for. It also allows you to select the quality of the translation provided – again, more about this below.

Weglot features

The features you get on your version of Weglot depend to a great extent on the monthly fee you are prepared to pay.

The pricing section below contains more details about this but the free version contains:

One translated language on one website
Up to 2,000 words translated
Up to 2,000 translated page views per month
Basic support

The Starter, Business, Pro and Advanced Plans add the following features:

Up to one million translated words and pageviews per month
Support for up to 10 websites
Premium support
Access to pro translators
Visitor/browser language redirection
More team members
Translated pageviews statistics
Export and import facility
Multiple language options in all versions

As you will see in the Shopify setup section, installing the app is very easy. Once installed, simply configure a few settings and start translating.

Once you have initiated a translation, you can review and edit all translated content before it goes live on your store.

Some of the other key features include:

Automatic content detection: Automatically detect all content on your website and have it translated (no human intervention required).
Easy to manage and customize: Intuitive interface to manage and edit all translations and easy to customize the language button to fit store design.
Team collaboration tools: invite team members and other professionals to review and edit within the app.
In-context editor: Use the unique editor to translate content with context in mind, helping you visualize what your website is going to look like.
Access to professional translators: You can access and order professional translation services through the app if you decide against totally automated translations.
Visitor automatic redirection: Automatically serve the right pages to your audience depending on their preferred language (WordPress)

Weglot Customer support

The support by the Weglot team provided is considered active and responsive by users.

While the free plan only offers limited support through the knowledge base, email form, and website support, the paid plans provide either basic dedicated support or more premium dedicated support in the case of the highest-tier plans.

The knowledge base includes good support for Shopify stores by all accounts but the support staff are responsive when called upon.

Machine or human-based translation?

Many store owners use Weglot’s first layer of machine translation because it is quick and effortless. You can get your entire store translated within minutes.

If you select this automatic translation option, the app uses some of the best machine learning tools on the web, including Microsoft and Google.

However, as you may have seen with automated Google translations, they might not be perfect. The beauty of Weglot is that you can use Weglot’s post-editing features to control the quality of your translations – or order professional human translations.

The manual review process allows you to edit and enhance your website translations with the help of your team.

If that still does not meet the needs and expectations of your customers, you can opt for professional translations. This ensures that the brand voice you desire is heard in any language you like.

Which languages are available?

You can choose a new language for your website from a list of more than 100 options. This probably covers 95 percent of the world’s population (caveat: complete guess 😊)

Unless your store specializes in making woven hats for a little-known Arctic tribe, you’re probably covered.

What else can Weglot do?

There are few other interesting features of Weglot that might be of interest for Shopify brands with a growing international audience.

You can create a localized experience for all customers by customizing every part of the buying journey with:

Landing page translations

Creating landing pages in the local language can do wonders for the conversion rates of specific campaigns.

Email notification translations

Translating your email notifications can be very useful when a customer places an order and automatically receives an email in their own language.

Checkout process and dynamic content translation

Weglot also allows you to translate your checkout process into any language – again better for conversions and fewer abandoned carts. It even translates pop-ups, reviews, and third-party apps.

What’s the SEO effect of Weglot?

Weglot follows Google best practices guidelines for multilingual SEO and is very search-engine-friendly.

Without getting too technical, when you translate a piece of text using Weglot, it is translated on the server-side. Google and other search engines can see and index the translated versions.

JavaScript solutions, for instance, only translate on the client-side, which can harm search rankings.

Other SEO benefits include:

Automatically creates an optimized multilingual architecture with sub-folders: a dedicated URL is provided for each version of your page, which is what Google recommends.
Automatically adds href lang tag in the HTML code to help inform Google that it needs to crawl and index other versions of the page too.
Translates SEO tags, metadata, images, and external links.

How do you make a Shopify store multilingual with Weglot?

Weglot is designed to integrate seamlessly with Shopify. You can get a brand-new language version of your store up and running with a few simple steps in as little as five minutes. There’s no complex coding to worry about.

From your Shopify admin dashboard, click on “Apps” and then “Add App” from the Shopify app store:

Open the Weglot app and create your account

Select your original and destination languages

Click on “Visit your website” or “Go to settings” to customize your Weglot setup

Add subdomains

Here’s where it gets slightly technical but it shouldn’t fry your brain too much.

Adding subdomains is for SEO purposes. Each different language version of your website should have a separate subdomain, e.g., https://fr.mywebsite/.

First, note that each language covered by Weglot has a two-letter code, e.g., Traditional Chinese is tw.

Go to your domain name provider’s page and access the section that allows you to manage your DNS. You will need to create a new CNAME entry with the ‘host’ set as the appropriate two-letter code for the language you’ve added and then point it to websites.weglot.com.

Once saved, return to the Weglot app settings in the Shopify dashboard and follow the simple setup instructions once you’ve clicked ‘Activate Subdomains’.

Customize settings

From the left-hand sidebar, you can edit the language switcher button, activate the auto-switch option, exclude specific content from translation or make other customizations.

To see all your content and start translating it, click on “Edit my translations”.

There! You’re pretty much done with your Weglot set up for Shopify and ready to join the world stage.

Note that the above process is for Shopify stores. Weglot is compatible with virtually all website and CMS technologies but the setup process will differ slightly with other platforms.

Weglot reviews

Weglot is used by many thousands of Shopify merchants and stores although it integrates with other platforms too.

The platform has received well over 1,000 reviews and maintains an average Shopify user rating of 4.7/5 stars.

Weglot Pricing

Weglot has a free version that allows up to 2,000 translated words in one language. There is also the option of starting a 10-day free trial to get a taste of the premium plans.

As far as the free plan is concerned, if you typed four pages of A4 text, it would amount to around 2,000 words as a very rough guideline.

So, for a small store that only requires translation of one landing page or a single product page into one language, you might find that the free version works for you.

(NOTE: Above pricing in Euros: 1 Euro = USD 1.2 approx.)

Most store owners reading this will want more scope and scalability than the limited free version allows. If you are regularly getting visitors with different first languages, the Starter plan for around $10/month might be a great option. It allows up to 10,000 words of translation.

From there, the monthly fee increases in stages. The more languages and content you need to translate, the higher the monthly fee – up to one million words in 10 different languages.

The Weglot.com website includes a word count estimation tool. If you exceed your limit because your store has more words than expected, you will receive get a notification before your plan is upgraded.

An enterprise version is also available (details provided upon application).

Weglot review 2021

With a 10-day free trial on offer, plus access to a free plan, there is no reason not to start providing different local language versions of your website if you’re like most stores and get visitors from an increasingly wide capture area of the globe.

You can see how it translates sections of your site into one trial language and get to grips with the easy-to-use translation management tools.

Whether you’re a small startup or an established store with analytics showing visitors coming from new areas and speaking new languages, Weglot can scale according to your needs. If you have multiple websites, you’re covered by the Pro plan or above.

There’s no reason not to take the first step towards becoming an international business!

Overview of Shopify’s URL structure

Of greatest concern to migrating store owners is usually that customers can find their products and collections and that rankings won’t be penalized.

Let’s first say that any impact on either of these should be very short-lived and, if you plan and manage your migration professionally in advance, you can minimize any impact at all.

Let’s take a look at the product and collection URL structures you are signing up to when you move to Shopify or Shopify Plus, as these are generally considered the most important.

Shopify Product URL structure

Shopify’s native URL structure places product URLs within a /products/ sub-folder. For example, in the KKW Beauty store, you see product URLs like this:

https://kkwbeauty.com/products/dual-ended-eye-contour-brush

The use of the products folder in the URL is fixed and unchangeable in Shopify – and is one of the main gripes that new store owners have about URL structure.

In many cases, the same product may be attached to two categories and exist under two URLs. For example, in the following shoe product example:

https://example.com/product/black-shoes/black-and-red-shoes/

https://example.com/product/red-shoes/black-and-red-shoes/

These URLs are both for the same product, so by choosing one as the “canonical URL”, you inform Google and other search engines which URL to show in the search results.

Product URLs in Shopify automatically contain the category path, so if someone searched for a product via a collection page, the collection page will show in the product URL like this:

https://bycharlotte.com.au/collections/align-your-soul/products/a-thousand-petals-fob-necklace

However, if you don’t want this to happen, it can be amended with a few changes to the template so that this is what users will see:

https://bycharlotte.com.au/products/a-thousand-petals-fob-necklace

As you can see, there is some “wiggle room” and flexibility with the product URLs but that does not apply to collections.

Shopify Collection URLs

Shopify store owners will need to get used to all collection URLs being within the /collections/ folder. This is fixed and cannot be changed in Shopify.

So, we have:

https://bycharlotte.com.au/collections/written-in-the-stars

On this page are all the products in the “Written in the Stars” jewelry collection.

Standardly, you may be used to being able to use a forward slash / in your URLs to further categorize your product collections, like this:

https://www.rebeccaminkoff.com/collections/shoes/black

Under Shopify’s URL structures, this will be rewritten with a hyphen to:

https://www.rebeccaminkoff.com/collections/shoes-black

What is the parent-child approach to URLs and does Shopify allow it?

“Parent and child” is a typical hierarchical approach to URL structuring that is widely seen as beneficial for SEO because it keeps pages organized logically.

It also helps customers find different versions of the product they are viewing. Amazon, for one, uses this type of URL structure.

So, a parent URL might be “t-shirt” and a child might be “royal blue t-shirt medium” or “red t-shirt large”.

However, Shopify does not support this type of “parent-child” relationship in a back-end capacity.

With Shopify, to achieve the same hierarchical effect you will need to use tags or filtered pages for an additional “layer” of categorization.

With tagging for black skinny jeans on fashion Nova, you will see this type of structure:

https://www.fashionnova.com/collections/skinny-jeans/black

The page emulates a collection from an SEO perspective only – not from a back-end management perspective.

With filtering you will see this structure:

https://www.fashionnova.com/collections/skinny-jeans?filters%5Btags%5D=ColorFam-Black

Although this system might work fine for you, some store owners find drawbacks compared to a more traditional parent-child approach. These include:

The customization involved
Lack of flexibility for merchandising, etc.
Difficulties managing this format when your store grows
Requires manual tagging logic
Difficulties with migrating these pages if you move platforms in the future

Is a sub-directory allowed for international stores on Shopify?

Sub-directories or subfolders for international versions of Shopify stores are not currently a feature of Shopify. So www.herschel/canada.com does not exist.

You will need to use CCtlds and sub-domains.

CCtlds are country code top-level domains and they show users and search engines in which country a website is registered, e.g., co.uk for the UK and .ca for Canada. So, for the Canadian version of the Herschel store, www.herschel.ca is used.
Sub-domains are additional parts to your main domain name, so if your primary domain is your-store-name.com, you can set up a domain for Canada as ca.your-store-name.com.

Adapting to Shopify’s URL structure

Most eCommerce business owners reading this will be considering moving to Shopify or Shopify Plus from the likes of Magento, WooCommerce, or another platform.

These other mainstream platforms are generally less restrictive than Shopify with URL structures so the transition to your new home may take a little getting used to.

You’re probably used to being able to do the following, for example:

Create product URLs directly from the root – e.g., /black-herschel-backpacks
Build landing pages on the root – e.g., /black-friday
Hierarchical category URLs based on a parent-child relationship – e.g., /tshirts/blue/medium
Customizing how sort/order and filtered URLs work – e.g., ?filter=blue vs #filter=blue

If you’re moving over to Shopify, you’re agreeing to wave goodbye to all that and to adopt a format that is rigid and that you may consider a little more complex.

You’ll basically need to accept that all pages on your store will have either /pages/, /collections/ or /products/ in the URL.

Shopify URL structure: who turns back once they migrate to Shopify?

Most store owners adapt very quickly to the URL structure – mainly because they have to as it’s largely non-negotiable!

When they start to tap into the whole ecosystem of apps that make life so much easier on the Shopify platform, they soon forget that they had initial gripes about the URL structure.

Shopify doesn’t adopt this URL strategy just to pee off store owners moving over. It is now operating as one of the largest ecommerce platforms in the world – so much so that Amazon is looking over its shoulder.

Let’s just say that few store owners who migrate to Shopify end up going back to another platform – and if they do, it’s not usually because of the URL structures imposed on them by the Shopify platform.