One of the fastest ways to increase traffic to your content and improve engagement is by localizing it.
English may be the most dominant language on the web, but it isn’t even the second most natively spoken language in the world.
So, if you’re only targeting English readers, you’ll never get your content in front of your total addressable market.
In this article, we explain how to localize and translate content in WordPress with just a few clicks.
What is WordPress localization?
WordPress localization is the process of changing your site’s WordPress content and design to serve different international audiences.
As WordPress’s locale statistics show, there are many global audiences worth targeting — less than half of the platform’s users are from English-speaking countries.
Localization, commonly shortened to l10n, is about more than translating the content on your WordPress website. You’ll need to localize your entire website, including images, currencies, videos, and even privacy laws. It’s important to consider cultural differences, too, and think about how you’ll need to optimize elements of your site for international SEO.
3 reasons to localize your WordPress site ASAP
“66% of businesses plan to localize in the next two years as part of their growth strategy. It’s increasingly something businesses are investing in because we’ve just become borderless.”
– Caroline Ren, Product Marketing Manager at Weblow (2024)
Still not enough to convince stakeholders? Let’s look at how it can increase your content’s ROI.
Reach a wider audience
How accessible do you think your site is to people in non-English-speaking countries? Not very, right? Even if these users do speak English, it’s not quite the same as interacting with a brand in your preferred language.
Making your site multilingual means as many people as possible can access it. You don’t even have to guess which languages you need to focus on. Google Analytics 4 provides a pre-built report that shows the top 10 languages of people who browse your site.
Increase rankings
You don’t need to have foreign customers right now to localize your WP site. The process of WordPress internationalization and localization can help you acquire customers through an increase in your organic rankings.
That’s right. Even if you’re not killing it on English-speaking Google, a multilingual WordPress site has the potential to rank in foreign language versions of Google and other country-specific search engines like Yandex and Baidu.
You’ll probably find these international rankings can be much easier to come by since there’s much less competition.
Improve conversion rates
Taking a single-language approach in a global world can kill your conversion rates. And no wonder — we all know consuming content in a foreign language can be confusing.
Localizing your site’s content is the secret to higher conversion rates and better experiences. Research shows that 75% of brands believe localized content increases customer engagement, and 96% say they generate positive ROI from localization efforts.
Why? Because it’s easier for users to complete actions when they read content in their own language.
Localized websites will also seem more trustworthy to users in local markets and provide a better user experience.
How to easily localize your content with the Lokalise WordPress plugin
WordPress doesn’t have out-of-the-box multilingual content support. So, before getting started with Lokalise, you’ll need to install the WPML or Polylang plugin to enable multilingual content support, and the Lokalise Companion plugin.
You can find both by navigating to Plugins on the WordPress admin panel and clicking Add new.
It doesn’t matter which multilingual plugin you use, as the steps you need to take are largely the same. For the sake of clarity, however, we’ll describe how to install and set up WPML in WordPress below.
Ready to get started? Just follow the steps below.
- Install and configure WordPress plugins
Start by installing the WPML and Lokalise Companion plugins inside WordPress
You’ll need to configure WPML before you can use it.
Navigate to the WPML section in the WordPress sidebar and click languages.
Choose the languages your website will support by adding or removing as many as you need. You can change your site’s default language if you wish.
You can also choose how visitors access each language:
- A directory (yoursite.com/de)
- A different domain (yoursite.de)
- Or as a GET parameter (yoursite.com/page?lange=de)
Next, you’ll need to set up the Lokalise Companion Plugin.
Head to the plugin’s settings by clicking on Settings in the WordPress admin sidebar and then Lokalise.
Copy the Authorization secret.
Caption: Copy the Lokalise authorization secret key in WordPress
Now login to Lokalise and create a new project in your Lokalise dashboard.
Choose the source language (the default language on your WP site) and your target languages (the ones you want added in WPML’s settings). Once you’ve done that, click Apps, then WordPress, and click Install.
Enter your WordPress site hostname (e.g. https://lokalise.com) and paste the authorization secret key.
2. Click Accept to authorize Lokalise to work with your WordPress site.
Import posts and pages to Lokalise
Once you’ve authorized Lokalise to connect with WordPress, you should see all your existing pages and posts in your Lokalise dashboard.
However, before you can translate them, you’ll need to import the content from WordPress. Select all the pages you wish to translate (you can find specific pages using the search bar) and then click Import selected.
Your content will now transfer from your WordPress site to your Localise dashboard.
3. Translate content using the Lokalise content editor
Once the content is imported, you can head to the project editor to start the translation process.
You can translate your WordPress content in Lokalise in a couple of ways. Let’s explore each of them below.
Set up automations to translate with MT or AI
Lokalise makes it possible to integrate translations into your continuous delivery workflow so that your pages get translated as soon as you create them in WordPress.
You can create automations during the WordPress import process. Click on More and Automations and then Create.
You’ll be presented with a box like the above, which lets you set exactly how you want your automation to work. Select Google or DeepL from the Actions dropdown to ensure Lokalise performs the translations automatically.
You can also use Lokalise AI to translate your WordPress site with context, giving you higher-quality translations at speed.
Make sure you add a style guide and glossary to guide Lokalise AI on tone, style, industry, audience, and more.
Submit new translation orders
Hiring a human to translate your content is easy with Lokalise. You can place a new order by clicking on the Orders button in the left-hand menu bar. Then click New order and select the following options:
- Choose Lokalise or Gengo if you want the help of a human linguist
- Choose “WordPress” as the project in the dropdown menu
- Select the source language
- Choose the target language(s). You can select more than one for a higher cost.
- Choose the service you want. These vary by provider.
- Brief your project in as much detail as possible.
Review the price and deadline. If you’re happy with how everything looks, click Go to checkout and complete your order.
Check for quality
Whether you use human translators or AI, you still need to check the quality of localizations to ensure they match the expectations of local markets.
Fortunately, you can do that within the Lokalise platform, too. Our localization quality assurance features include automated spelling and grammar checks for 22 languages and automatic suggestions.
Export translated items back to WordPress
Once human linguists or AI tools have translated your content, you’re going to want to import it back into WordPress. Lokalise makes this simple.
Head back to the WordPress app in Lokalise.
Choose the items you want to export and click Export selected.
Choose the languages to export (we’re exporting English, French, and Russian in the example above) and click okay.
That’s it. Job done.
You can check that your translations have been imported successfully by heading to your WordPress admin dashboard and checking the posts or pages you exported. You should see pencil icons next to each post or page, which let you edit the localized versions.
Why do I need more than one WP plugin for localization?
While a plugin like WPML or Polylang will turn your WordPress website from a single-language site into a multilingual one, localization isn’t straightforward unless these plugins are paired with the Lokalise companion plugin.
By combining two plugins together, content managers can automate large parts of the l10n process. Not just the translation itself — although that can be automated using AI solutions — but the process of downloading content from your WordPress site, sharing it with translators, and republishing it on the CMS.
There’s also no need to communicate with developers since everything happens in a low- or no-code environment and translations are automatically uploaded as new posts in WordPress.
4 rookie mistakes to avoid when localizing WordPress content
It’s easy to get carried away once you’ve set up your plugins and sent off your first translation. After all, the combination of multilingual plugins and Localise makes WordPress localization incredibly straightforward.
But take care not to commit one of the following rookie mistakes.
Translating content, but not localizing it
Translating content directly from one language to another without any thought of context or cultural norms is a massive no-no. It can result in poorly worded copy, cultural faux pas, or literal translations that make no sense.
A major issue is failing to localize things like dates, times, idioms, and units of measure. Take the image below, for example.
These things may not be obvious to us, but they stick out like a sore thumb to native speakers. At best, they make your brand look sloppy; at worst, they insult or confuse your potential customers and show a lack of care for cultural norms.
Fortunately, Lokalise has multiple solutions to solve this issue, including automated quality assurance checks, market-leading AI translations that account for these features, and the ability to work with professional linguists from inside the platform.
Poor communication and collaboration
As much as the plugins we’ve discussed in this article let you localize your WordPress site with very little additional input, you still need to communicate and collaborate successfully with linguists, designers, and marketers.
Lokalise has strong collaborative translation features to ensure all tasks are being carried out as they should, according to your vision. This includes a unified dashboard that lets you keep track of everything at once with chained tasks, custom statuses, and real-time reports.
Not localizing everything
Localizing content is just part of the localization process, albeit a major one. In most cases, you will also have to account for how localizing content can impact your site’s design. Text length can vary significantly from one language to another, which means design features — especially buttons — can break.
Solve this by providing translators with additional context using design files from platforms like Figma, Sketch, and Adobe XD.
Lokalise integrates with all these platforms, making it easy to upload visual material to the platform and share it with translators.
This allows translators to take account of the design when carrying out their work and notify you or a project manager immediately when the design needs to change. That could mean using a smaller font, or it could mean a completely localized design. In either case, delays will be kept to a minimum because of your proactive approach.
Not automating the process
Don’t become a bottleneck in your website localization process. While content managers will want to keep an eye on everything, you’ll quickly slow down the process if you have to manually assign translations, approve them, and upload them.
Get out of your own way by using automations to speed up the process.
With Lokalise’s Automations feature enabled, the system will automatically perform certain actions based on identified changes. That can include translations, but you can also automate tasks like:
- Quality assurance
- Project assignment
- Status management
You can even eliminate the needless waiting that happens in some project management systems by changing tasks with predefined next steps so that the next task in the chain automatically starts when the former is completed.
Localize your WordPress site today
WordPress is a fantastic CMS and a great way to build and manage websites.
While it doesn’t have multilingual support out of the box, there are several plugins that provide this functionality. Combine either WPML or Polylang with the Lokalise Companion Plugin and you have an easy way to localize your WordPress site in minutes.
Start localizing your WordPress site today with Lokalise. Get a 14-day free trial.
