WordPress powers 43% of websites and only some of them are in English. That could be a huge mistake!
Statistics show that around 56% of WordPress websites are created in languages other than English. That means 44% of websites are potentially missing out on new visitors, followers or customers.
Significant numbers of sales come from non-English speaking countries like China, Japan, Germany, South Korea, India, and others.
We think it’s essential to appeal to all of your audience, and what better way to do that than by translating your website?
In this article, we’ll explain how you can translate SureCart into your language.
SureCart is a new evolution of WordPress eCommerce plugins. We are doing everything we can to make it easy for you to create your eCommerce website.
Translating content into your preferred language is just one of the benefits of using it!
Why translate your eCommerce website?
There are some powerful reasons why you would want to translate your eCommerce website.
Only 17% of people speak English
Recent research suggests that around 1.5 billion people speak English worldwide. That’s only 17% of the world’s population.
While English might be a dominant language for business, it is far from universally spoken.
Apart from English, languages like Chinese, Spanish, and Arabic are most commonly used on the internet.
English-only eCommerce websites could be missing out on a significant portion of their potential market.
Here are a few more stats supporting the need for a multilingual eCommerce website:
- 56% of customers said that the ability to obtain information in their language is more important than price.
- 73% of customers prefer to purchase from a site that provides information in their native language.
- 60% of shoppers rarely or never buy from English-only websites.
- 61% of eCommerce owners are making their website available in more than one language, 13% in 2 others, and 26% in more than 2.
Grow your customer base
Your identity is bound by the language you speak. If you operate in countries that don’t speak English, or where it isn’t the dominant language, translating your eCommerce website should result in an increased customer base.
If 73% of customers prefer to purchase from a site that provides information in their native language, delivering on that need should help you reach markets you would otherwise miss.
Search engine ranking
With a multilingual website, you can rank for multilingual keywords.
For websites outside of the United States, a language other than English is more likely to have a higher listing on search engines.
There’s a great possibility that you rank in English keywords as well as locally translated keywords. This, in return, benefits you by attracting more visitors to your eCommerce store.
Multiple languages are proven to rank in SEO, which is reason enough to do it!
Customer satisfaction
When we browse through an eCommerce website, the aspect that attracts us is user-friendliness. It makes our experience on the site much more enjoyable.
76% of people will stop purchasing from a website after only two poor customer experiences.
Your customers will likely have a positive experience if they are comfortable understanding the products and the content defining them.
Around 73% of customers prefer purchasing from a website that provides information in their native language.
Improved personalization
Translating an eCommerce website gives a feeling of personalization to customers. They can select from the language option and scroll your website in their preferred language.
How to translate SureCart into your language
The steps involved in translating SureCart into any language are quite simple. Let’s view each step in detail.
Step 1: Install and activate Loco Translate
As a first step, we recommend installing the Loco Translate plugin.
The plugin is available on the WordPress repository and you can install it from your WordPress dashboard.
- Head to Plugins > Add New
- Search for Loco Translate using the plugin search box
- Install and activate the plugin
Step 2: Select SureCart on Loco Translate
Once activated, you should see a new menu item, Loco Translate on the sidebar of your dashboard.
- Head to Loco Translate > Plugins
- Select SureCart from the list of plugins
Step 3: Choose a language to translate
When you click on SureCart, you can see the message ‘No translation found for SureCart’. This is because you’ve not yet translated it into any other language.
- Click the + New language option on the page
- Select the language you would like to translate
For this article, we will select German. You can select your preferred language and proceed further.
Step 4: Select system as a location
On the page, you can see another option asking you to choose a location.
- Set the location to the system
If you don’t set it to the system, you’re likely to miss out on a couple of benefits.
This is because some bits of text that are used in the checkout forms and other parts of the plugins are inside JavaScript.
Setting it to the system enables the plugin to translate the entire website including JavaScript and other elements.
Step 5: Start translating
Once you’ve selected the language and location, it’s time to translate.
- Click on the Start translating button to start the process
Step 6: Select the text string and translate
On the page, you can view all the texts that are used in the plugin and the option to translate them.
Here’s what your screen will look like:
You can view all the text that is used on the checkout form or elsewhere in the SureCart by checking the source text.
To translate your website:
- Select source text on the page you would like to translate
- Enter the translation of the selected source text
In the similar way, you can select all the text from the source text one by one and translate it to your preferred language.
For all the text you translate, you’ll see source text along with the translated words
Once complete, double check to ensure that there is no mistake in the translation.
Step 7: Save the changes
Next we need to save the changes so we can use them.
- Save the changes by clicking on the Save button
What happens when you update SureCart?
SureCart is a relatively new plugin that has amazing features and functionalities. It is also being constantly developed so will have new versions released regularly.
What happens to your translations when you update?
Check the following to ensure that all text remains translated when you update to a new version of SureCart.
Once you have updated SureCart:
- Click on the Sync button
If any new text has been added, you can view it in the source text pane.
- Select the text and translate it as we did above
- Save the changes to use the translated text on your website
As you can see it’s simple to make sure all content in your SureCart store has been translated.
Alternatives to Loco Translate
While we suggest using the Loco Translate plugin, there are other options out there.
TranslatePress
TranslatePress is a WordPress translation plugin designed to be used by everyone. It helps you to easily translate your website from the front end with minimal effort.
You can use TranslatePress with WooCommerce and with SureCart. The plugin is built to be compatible with complex themes and site builders so should work in most situations..
Google Translate for WordPress
Google Translate for WordPress is a plugin designed and developed to translate your website into any language. It’s a powerful plugin that will help you index your translated pages into a search engine and increase search potential.
For each language, the plugin provides a separate URL, so you can use the preferable link in the required place.
Conclusion
This wraps up our article on translating SureCart into another language.
Multilingual websites are doing great in terms of search engine indexing, total revenue, customer satisfaction, and many other factors.
Those are all great reasons to translate your store into other languages.
In this article, we discussed why having a multilingual website is beneficial and how you can translate your eCommerce website using a free plugin.
We learned to translate SureCart into your language and discussed two great alternatives, TranslatePress and Google Translate for WordPress.
What do you think of this article? Do you want to translate your eCommerce website too? Which plugin did you use? Do let us know!
Disclosure: This blog may contain affiliate links. If you make a purchase through one of these links, we may receive a small commission. Read disclosure. Rest assured that we only recommend products that we have personally used and believe will add value to our readers. Thanks for your support!
Hello, thank you for the very precise and interesting article! I just have to put it into practice.
I wanted to know about the products, how to have them in two languages?
Thank you for your answer, continue with SureCart it’s great!
Hello Baconnet,
Currently, we do not have the option to translate products into different languages.