Say you’re an American shopper looking to give a friend a sweater. At last, you find the perfect product: It’s impeccably knitted, available in several lovely shades, and offers the option to add a custom embroidered monogram.
But something feels off. The item description invites you to “personalise” your “colours,” noting that a monogram adds a “fortnight” to the processing time. If you purchase the “£200 jumper” by “2 November” it’s guaranteed to arrive in time for Christmas. Miss that deadline, and it’s “Boxing Day” or later.
You can read every word—the copy is in your native language—but it feels like it wasn’t written for you, leaving you feeling like an outsider. This highlights the importance of website localization for different audiences. Here’s what you need to know.
Table of contents
What is website localization?
Website localization is adapting your online presence to make it feel more natural and welcoming to your target audiences. Unlike translation, which just converts words from one language into another, localization adapts the entire user experience—including local language, cultural context, currency, payment methods, domain suffixes, design, and layout—to make visitors feel at home rather than like they’re browsing a foreign site.
Elements of your localization strategy may include:
- Domains. Set up region-specific top-level domains (like .com, .mx, .ca) with automatic user redirection.
- Currencies. Shoppers want to understand pricing immediately, in their native currency. Ecommerce sites that localize currencies on product pages see a 40% increase in conversion rates.
- Payment methods. Preferences change across borders. Payment options should reflect these local expectations. For example, digital payment systems like Apple Pay are popular in China and Western Europe, while most transactions in the Netherlands use a domestic payment method called iDEAL.
- Language translation. Visitors can’t shop on websites they can’t read.
- Imagery. Adapt visual content to resonate with cultural nuances and local sensibilities.
Why localize your website?
Localization is important for ecommerce businesses hoping to attract a global audience or break into new markets. Adapting to the local culture builds trust and improves the customer experience, which can translate into increased sales.
“Localizing is not only translation to different languages but also semantics like spelling, idioms, date formatting, currency symbols—plus design that considers the cultural context,” says Derek Gleason, senior lead, content at Shopify. “These may sound like little details, but this is what makes someone feel the experience was made for them. When those little details are wrong, the shopper notices.”
That’s what differentiates true localization from simple translation. As Derek explains, “You can publish in the same language for the US, UK, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, but those semantics will be different.”
For an example of localization’s importance, consider Petal & Pup, an Australian fashion retailer that expanded to New Zealand, the United Arab Emirates, and Canada. By localizing its ecommerce store and personalizing content for each region, international sales now represent 20% of the company’s total revenue.
Best practices for effective website localization
- Identify teams, tools, and workflows
- Hire a local expert
- Define your goals
- Start small
- Account for translation and preferences
- Adopt continuous localization
When you embark on localization efforts, keep these best practices in mind:
Identify teams, tools, and workflows
Full-scale website localization can involve lots of moving parts, so it’s helpful to have a dedicated person or a team responsible for orchestrating the localization workflow. Several tools may also be available within your website platform and content management system to help your team with these processes.
For example, Shopify Managed Markets serves as a hub for your expansion activities, simplifying the process of offering international payment methods, custom themes, region-specific reporting, and more. The Shopify App Store includes additional services like the Geo:Pro app, which redirects international shoppers to their localized ecommerce domain.
Other localization solutions include software specifically designed for this purpose—like Smartling, Weglot, Lokalise, and Crowdin—several of which offer translation services. Additionally, artificial intelligence has enabled several general machine translation tools that can significantly cut translation costs compared to human translation. (Note that computer-assisted translation scan result in clunky, word-for-word phrasing or introduce errors—it’s best to have a native speaker review them.)
Hire a local expert
If it’s financially feasible, Derek recommends hiring local subject matter experts who deeply understand the local customs, interests, sensitivities, and preferred tone. These professional translators can offer recommendations on storytelling, images that may fall flat due to cultural differences, and the best way to present information to your target audience.
“They share things you’d never know otherwise,” Derek says. “We were adapting a US blog post for a Southeast Asian localized website, so we planned to swap in a local example—and the subject matter experts actually said, ‘No, keep the US example because that will build credibility.’ Tapping local experts helped us get maximum empathy and confidence with that customer base.”
Define your goals
Website localization can be a comprehensive overhaul (like building sites entirely tailored for specific markets) or targeted tactics (like redirecting users to local top-level domains with local currencies while keeping the main storefront similar). Start by determining your goals, then defining the scope of your website localization strategy. Ask yourself:
- Are you looking to improve an existing site or create a new one tailored to a specific target market?
- Is your goal to drive website traffic or increase sales?
- According to your sales data, which foreign markets are most important, and which underperforming regions could use a boost?
- What’s possible with your resources?
Dream big, but ensure your goals are also in alignment with the resources you can feasibly leverage. “It would be great to localize for 20 markets—but in reality, that’s a huge cost and time undertaking,” Derek says. “Be realistic about what you can do, and think critically about where you can have the most impact.”
Start small
Localization can be an expensive endeavor, and it needs to show a return on investment (ROI). Thankfully, it doesn’t require an all-or-nothing approach. If your budget is constrained, Derek recommends starting with incremental and targeted tactics.
“Maybe you’ve had a German site for a while, but you've never actively localized call-to-action buttons,” Derek says. “You can do that inexpensively because it's a small amount of text, and then you measure impact. If it gives you a 10% lift in Germany for X number of dollars, you can determine if localization services are worth it for the full site—or in other international markets too.”
You might consider a hybrid approach: Perhaps you hire local experts for high-visibility content, product descriptions, and CTAs, but lean on AI for less-visited pages. “It’s also possible to localize language yourself by doing your own research,” Derek says. “If you’re a native English speaker, you can find phrases and date formatting for Australia and the UK. You won’t become a local expert, but you can still do basic localization in-house.”
Account for translation and preferences
You may have to adapt your website design to the translated content. Depending on your target language, the new copy can fundamentally transform text layout and volume.
“At Shopify, working on our own localization, we realized that a translation caused a word within a headline to be split between lines,” Derek says. “It’s why you can’t always go ‘words first’ with localization. Everything has to fit the user interface.”
For example, translating from English to German can lengthen text by about 10% to 35%. “Add to Cart” becomes “In den Warenkorb,” and “tracking” becomes “sendungsverfolgung.” Languages like Japanese, Chinese, and Korean expand vertically compared to English. Others, like Arabic and Hebrew, read right to left. Some cultures may favor minimalist or image-heavy design; others prefer text explanations. Your web pages’ design and layouts must account for this diversity.
Adopt continuous localization
Many small businesses leverage waterfall localization, which involves creating the main site first, then adapting it into new versions for different regions. But some businesses—often new, inherently global companies—can embrace continuous localization. This more agile approach involves creating localized sites simultaneously with the source-language version, enabling them to launch into new markets all at once while keeping the website’s content continuously updated.
But don’t worry if this isn’t in your budget. The goal isn’t perfection, but demonstrating genuine care for and interest in your audience. “Small businesses don’t have to pretend to be an enterprise to succeed with localization,” Derek says. “Ask yourself: Do we have enough credibility that cuts across all languages? Are we making an effort to show some amount of focus on our international customers in important markets, even if it’s not perfectly built from scratch for their region? If the answers are yes, you’re doing it right.”
Website localization FAQ
How do you localize website content?
First, determine your website internationalization goals and assemble an in-house or external team to manage the website localization project. You can combine website translation and localization methods, hiring professional translators and leveraging designers, AI, and other tools to create localized versions of sites, test ROI, and iterate over time.
What is the purpose of website localization?
The website localization process is adapting or creating a site that is designed for a specific region’s audience—that includes catering to their language, cultural nuances, and preferences. One of the main benefits of website localization is it can unlock new global markets. Adapting to the local culture builds trust and improves the customer experience, which can translate into increased sales.
What is the difference between website translation and website localization?
Translation is only one aspect of localization. Proper localization refers to the contextual. It involves adapting text and visual content, site design, and the overall user experience to meet the preferences of the target culture.
