How to Translate Your Shopify Store

Why Translate Your Store

Research consistently shows that customers prefer to shop in their native language. A study by CSA Research found that 76% of online shoppers prefer to buy products with information in their own language, and 40% will never buy from websites in other languages.

Translation is not just about accessibility. It directly impacts your conversion rates, average order value, and customer trust. A localised shopping experience signals that you understand and value your international customers.

Using Shopify Markets

Shopify Markets is the native solution for managing international selling, including languages and currencies. It provides a centralised dashboard for all your international configurations.

Setting Up Markets

1. 1
   Access Markets

   Go to Settings → Markets in your Shopify admin. You'll see your primary market (usually your home country) already configured.

2. 2
   Add New Markets

   Click "Add market" and select the countries or regions you want to target. You can group similar countries together or create individual markets.

3. 3
   Configure Languages

   For each market, add the relevant languages. Shopify supports over 20 languages natively, including right-to-left languages like Arabic and Hebrew.

4. 4
   Set Up Subfolders

   Enable subfolders (e.g., /fr/ for French, /de/ for German) to create separate URLs for each language, which is essential for SEO.

Translation Apps

While Shopify provides basic translation functionality, dedicated apps offer more features, better workflows, and higher quality translations.

Manual Translations

For complete control over your translations, you can manage them manually through Shopify's built-in translation editor.

Accessing the Translation Editor

Navigate to Settings → Languages in your Shopify admin. Select a language and click "Translate" to access the editor. You can translate content by resource type:

• •Products: Titles, descriptions, variants, and metafields
• •Collections: Collection names and descriptions
• •Pages: All custom pages and their content
• •Blog posts: Article titles, content, and excerpts
• •Navigation: Menu items and link text
• •Theme content: Buttons, labels, and static text

Language Selector Setup

A clear, accessible language selector helps visitors switch to their preferred language. Most modern Shopify themes include a built-in selector, but you may need to customise it.

Placement Best Practices

• •Header: Top right corner is the standard location, often combined with currency selector
• •Footer: Include a secondary selector in the footer for users who scroll
• •Use flags with caution: Flags represent countries, not languages. Spanish is spoken in many countries, so a Spain flag can confuse Latin American visitors
• •Show language names in their native form: Display "Deutsch" not "German", "Français" not "French"

Auto-Detection

Shopify Markets can automatically detect a visitor's location and suggest the appropriate language and currency. Enable this in Markets settings, but always provide a manual override option.

SEO Considerations

Proper multilingual SEO ensures each language version of your store ranks well in local search results. Get this wrong, and you may cannibalise your own rankings.

URL Structure

Shopify uses subfolders by default (yourstore.com/fr/, yourstore.com/de/). This is the recommended approach for most stores as it consolidates domain authority.

Hreflang Tags

Hreflang tags tell search engines which language version of a page to show to users. Shopify automatically generates these when you use Markets with subfolders enabled.

Translated Meta Data

Ensure your page titles, meta descriptions, and alt text are translated for each language. This is often overlooked but crucial for ranking in local search results.

Testing Your Translations

Before launching, thoroughly test your translated store to catch errors and ensure a smooth experience for international customers.