Your company website is often the first opportunity you have to make a good impression on a global audience. By following website localization best practices, you can ensure your message resonates with new potential customers and your company is set up to successfully achieve global growth objectives.

Why You Need Website Localization Services for Worldwide Success

Website localization offers powerful benefits to your business, which can help drive long-term growth. A localized website with high-quality content allows you to:

Expand your reach into new markets

There are nearly 5 billion internet users worldwide, and if your website is only in English, you’re only reaching about a quarter of them. It’s a simple fact that people process information better and have more trust in content in their native language.

So it’s no surprise that 72% of people prefer to use websites in their own language for most things they do online. That makes choosing the right website localization techniques key to penetrating lucrative new markets.

Establish credibility and trust

When surveyed, 75% of consumers judge an organization’s trustworthiness based on its website. A website localized for customers in your target markets shows that you value their needs and respect their language, identity, and culture. In return, multilingual web content helps build trust in your brand, and that’s good for business. On average, consumers spend over 25% more on brands they trust.

Keep website visitors actively engaged with your brand

Customers interact with brands that feel authentic, relevant, and aligned with their priorities and values. Localizing your website isn’t simply about translating your content; it allows your brand to become culturally relevant, inspiring engagement. Locally targeted content boasts 6x higher engagement rates than unlocalized content.

Leverage international SEO strategies

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a top priority for most companies for good reason. In one poll, 49% of marketers stated that organic search had the highest ROI of all digital channels. Furthermore, the top five organic search results on the first page account for nearly 68% of total clicks. The higher your website ranks, the better it is for your business.

The challenge is that the SEO landscape in the United States is highly competitive. Website localization provides a solution to this problem. There is far less competition for SEO keywords in languages other than English.

If your website is multilingual, you can rank for a number of less competitive keywords in other languages, which helps attract more traffic to your website. Simultaneously, ranking well for non-English keywords helps boost your Domain Authority (DA), which can also help your website rank better for English keywords.

Industries That Benefit From Website Localization Services

If your website is an e-commerce marketplace, localization is an absolute must for global success. Product offerings, pricing, payment methods, and currency often vary by locale, and a lack of localization can disinterest potential customers. In one survey, 40% of respondents stated they wouldn’t purchase from websites in other languages.

However, it’s not just e-commerce websites that benefit from localization. With the overwhelming customer preference for native language content, there are compelling reasons to invest in website localization for businesses and organizations of all types, including:

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) providers – Users overwhelmingly prefer software in their own language. If a software company’s website isn’t localized, potential customers may assume that the company’s product isn’t localized either and move on to a competitor for their purchase.

Financial services companies – Whether it’s fintech, cryptocurrency, or blockchain-based banking, financial services companies face vastly different legal and regulatory environments from country to country. Website localization helps these businesses ensure compliance in all of their markets.

Non-profit organizations – From education and the arts to the environment and health, non-profit organizations connect with their audiences through a shared passion for a mission. Website localization services allow these organizations to deliver their message with maximum impact across multiple languages and cultures.

8 Best Practices for Web Content Localization

When done correctly, website localization can deliver the kind of business results you’re looking for. Here are some best practices to consider for successful website localization:

1. Ensure your website is ready for localization

A smooth website localization experience starts with choosing the right Content Management System (CMS). Team members across markets will likely need access to the CMS, so ensure that the interface is intuitive and user-friendly.

Next, you’ll want to remove potential barriers to translation and localization from your website—a process known as internationalization. This may include checking to see if your website’s technology is flexible enough to handle different character sets, date, and time formats, and currencies. Ensuring your website is set up to handle multilingual content before beginning your initiative will help create a more seamless localization process.

2. Account for language directionality and length differences

Some languages, like French and German, may require more space than English, while languages like Chinese or Korean may require less. When translating, the last thing you want is for your localized website content to not fit your website’s design or to be cut off. Your website needs to be built with flexibility, allowing for different languages, including language directionality (e.g., right-to-left or top-to-bottom languages versus left-to-right).

3. Keep text separate from images

Text embedded within images is difficult to localize because it isn’t easily separable. Instead, consider using a translatable text layer for images, for example using CSS. Utilizing best practices for multimedia localization allows for a more seamless translation experience.

4. Check your localized content for broken or missing characters

If you see garbled characters in your localized content—such as question marks systematically placed in words where they don’t belong—this usually means the character set for the language isn’t supported.

You can avoid these issues by ensuring you are using the correct encoding to handle these special characters. Unicode is typically the industry standard because it can represent over 1.1 million characters and uses more bits per character than ASCII.

5. Ensure your database schema can support international variations

If your website relies on a database for various functionalities, it’s important to consider localization from the start when creating that database. Database fields can be built in ways that make it impossible to display multilingual variations. To support website localization, you’ll need to ensure your database schema is flexible enough to accommodate multilingual content.

6. Avoid hardcoding time, currency, and date formats

Date and time formats, not to mention currency, vary wildly between different locales. Managing these formats can become very complex if they’re hardcoded. To reduce complexity, consider using standard formats like ISO, epoch time, or UTC. There are also libraries like Date.js and Moment.js that will automatically format dates and times for each geography.

7. Account for differences in name structure and ordering

There are many different naming conventions used in countries around the world. In English-speaking cultures, given name + middle name + family name is the typical structure. However, in other cultures, a person’s full name may include the mother’s family name, the father’s family name, the father’s given name, the grandfather’s given name, a middle name (a name derived from the father’s name), a title of respect, or a religious name.

Names are also ordered differently in many cultures. For example, Korean names begin with the family name first and the given name last.

It’s important to account for this complexity when creating the database for your company’s website. To accommodate the variety of naming conventions, you should consider using a single field for "Full Name". This way, you won’t end up with individual names in a family name list and vice versa.

8. Make it easy and intuitive for users to switch languages on your website

A seamless user experience makes people feel welcome on your website and encourages them to spend more time there. Many people are fluent in more than one language, so make sure that the way to switch languages is prominent by placing the language selector in an easily visible location on your website.

It’s also important to create a consistent experience in the selected language. Don’t switch users to a different language without their permission. If your website doesn’t have content in the user’s preferred language, let them know when they click the link and let them decide whether they wish to proceed.