Website localization is the process of adapting a website to the culture and language of users in the target market. People around the world are much more likely to buy from a website in their native language. In fact, 65% of consumers prefer information in their own language, even if it’s of lower quality.

However, deploying a multilingual website is not simply about copying your original content verbatim into another language. It involves taking into account cultural differences, legal requirements, shopping habits and payment methods, just to name a few aspects of a complex process like website localization.

If you are feeling daunted by the task ahead, don’t worry: website localization doesn’t have to be a headache. If you are looking for the best ways to localize your website, these 10 website localization steps will help you avoid common localization mistakes, launch your multilingual website fast and ensure a perfect user experience (UX) for international users.

1. Plan a strategy and prepare for website localization
Over 5 billion people use the internet every day. Most of them are from Asia, America and Europe. While that doesn’t guarantee that all of them are candidates for what your business is selling, it does highlight the huge potential and the reality that if you are only selling in one market, you are missing out on a massive potential profit. So, it is imperative for any business that wants to expand globally to consider international sales potential right from the start.

If you’re just starting to design your website or update your existing one, taking website localization into account from the beginning can save you a lot of time and money later on. Think big and think globally: Even if your initial market is local or small, that doesn’t mean it will always be that way. Whether you are selling productivity software or clothes for premature babies, global trends are converging, a product successful at home has the potential to become a worldwide phenomenon.

A localization strategy designed from the start will help you clarify your purpose, have a plan of action for expansion, and have a real business advantage. Some aspects you need to consider as part of your website localization strategy are:

-Your product or service: Is it easy to transfer to another culture or market, or will it need significant adjustments?
-Your company’s localization vision: If you want to expand, how will it look?
-Pricing: Do you need to change your pricing model for different regions?
-Ideal target market: Which language, culture and demographics are suitable for your product?
-Localization timeline: How long do you want to expand and be active in new markets?
-Localization budget: How much are you willing to spend on translation, layout changes and other necessary adjustments? Can you manage the entire localization project yourself or do you need to outsource?
-People: What employees does your company currently have that can support the localization process?
-Technology: Which tools and methods are best suited to your business goals, resources and time?

2. Market Research
As we have seen, a global website is one of the most powerful tools for attracting new customers and generating leads from around the world. Part of a well-planned localization strategy is ensuring you have a deep understanding of the markets your website needs to target. You may not need to embark on a full-blown localization project into over 1,000 languages if your core customer base resides in one or two countries, identifying your target market and where you think your product will be most successful is crucial.

Begin with those areas first, and remember that new markets can open up in the future. Carefully analyze which countries are most likely to yield a greater return on investment (ROI) for localization. Even large global companies like McDonald’s have had to close stores in certain countries, either unable to find enough market demand (or compliance with laws).

Once you’ve determined your target markets, it’s time to do some in-depth research to understand what customers truly want in each market. Using general data about an entire continent is not good enough. For example, the French are different from the Spanish. The Spanish don’t have the same culture as the Germans. More importantly, they don’t share the same language.

Try to define your international buyer persona by conducting specific market research in each geographical area you want to reach [or use a persona tool such as HubSpot. ]. For example, you’ll need to analyze and assess demand. If your product is only partially popular in one region, you might start there. For each market, try asking a few simple but essential questions:

-Is there any interest in your product in this specific market?
-How is the market growing?
-How much competition is there?
-Can local buyers afford your product?
-What are their shopping preferences?
-What are the costs of shipping and customer support?
-How high are the costs of website localization compared to the market potential?

It’s important to reach the highest number of potential customers without spending more than your company can afford. However, you should consider all your marketing and financial metrics when deciding which markets to approach. For example, China clearly has enormous potential if you look at the number of internet users, but these numbers become irrelevant if you don’t have an opportunity to sell your product due to strict censorship laws.

3. Establishing a Dedicated Team for Website Localization
Website localization has many stakeholders. In fact, one of the reasons localization can become challenging is because of all the different groups involved, from management and developers to designers and linguists, marketers, content writers, and QA engineers... the list goes on.

A well-organized localization team will ensure the project is completed on time and to a high standard, while also avoiding conflicts between the different stakeholders involved. The size of your team might be limited by your budget, but a successful website localization project requires people who understand what makes your target customers tick.

In other words, you’ll need people who can help you bridge the cultural and linguistic gap between your domestic and international customers. Here are some of the main groups involved:

-A localization manager or translation project manager who can assign tasks and ensure everyone is on track
-One or more developers who can support your internationalization process (more details below) and localization efforts from a technical standpoint
-One or more designers who can adapt images or designs to fit a diverse audience
-A team of excellent native-speaking translators who can accurately translate your content and make the copy sound natural in the target language
-QA engineers who can check how everything works after localization and ensure there are no bugs or glitches on the website
-A local support team for each market that will answer customer questions, manage online reviews, and handle any other customer service issues

The importance of hiring professional translators and editors cannot be overstated. Top-notch translators will be able to translate and localize your message in a way that locals instantly recognize. You need to convey the same amount of intelligence, wit, and appeal as your original message.

Above all, your team will need to be able to work well together and collaborate with one another. If you also support their work with the right technology (more on that later), you’ll be setting them up for success.

4. Keyword Research
Right after you’ve decided on your target market and before you begin the actual localization work, you should conduct some keyword research for your localized website. This will help you understand what terms people in your target market are using to search for products or services like yours and how those terms differ from the terms people in your domestic market use.

By identifying the best terms and keyword phrases to use on your localized website, you can ensure that your content shows up in relevant searches. This multilingual SEO (search engine optimization) technique and others will help you reach more people and improve your search engine ranking, leading to higher traffic and lower costs for you over time (as you won’t have to pay for advertising to reach your target audience).

The most important thing to remember when it comes to keyword research is that you shouldn’t simply translate your domestic market keywords. You need to find out how people in your target market actually talk about your product or service. Just like British English and American English often use different words to describe the same thing, “holiday in Orlando” versus “vacation in Orlando,” so do other languages depending on the region. Even the best content will fail if your target audience can’t find it in the first place.

That’s when multilingual keyword research comes in handy. Either marketers who speak your target language can conduct this research for you, or you can designate a team of translators who specialize in SEO to assist you. Whoever conducts it, with the right mix of market knowledge, SEO expertise, purpose-built tools, and language skills, they’ll be able to uncover the best localized terms to attract more visitors and generate more leads.

5. Automating the Website Localization Process
If you’re thinking about managing your website localization project manually, you might want to think again. You wouldn’t type your dissertation on a typewriter or calculate complex equations without a calculator-relying on a string of emails, text documents, and spreadsheets is equally inefficient, if not more so, for website localization, to manage your website localization project.

There’s a lot of room for error when you localize your website manually. You have global teams working in silos, translators guessing what comes next, and developers unsure how to properly split right-to-left (RTL) or vertical languages. It takes forever, you have to go back and forth, and in the end you end up overspending on your project.

Enter localization technology. Just as other technologies automate other processes within your business, localization software can cut down on the time and costs associated with website localization. In the fast-paced development process within an agile framework, you need technology that can help your localization efforts keep up.

The main types of software that can streamline your website localization process include:

-Translation Management Systems (TMS): These platforms allow you to build a centralized database for all of your translations, which can then be accessed and managed by any team member. By integrating with other platforms in your business, like your content management system (CMS) or customer relationship management (CRM) system, TMS can automate a variety of different localization tasks.
-Computer-Aided Translation (CAT) Tools: CAT tools help translators work more efficiently by allowing them to store and reuse previously translated content (called a "translation memory"). Not only does this save time, it also helps to ensure that your brand messaging remains consistent across all content. Most modern TMS include integrated CAT tools or you can use standalone options.
-Machine Translation (MT): This technology can be used to automatically translate content, which can then be edited by a human translator depending on the level of quality needed. MT is constantly improving, with the latest versions understanding grammar, context, and natural language better than ever before.
-Language Quality Assurance (QA) Tools: These tools help you check translated content for errors before you launch it on your website. QA tools can be used to automatically identify issues like missing translations, inaccurate numbers, and unbalanced text flow, among other issues. These tools are often integrated into TMS solutions, but like CAT tools, you can also use them as standalone products.
-Terminology Management Tools: These are platforms where you can store all of your approved brand terminology and glossaries. This ensures that everyone working on your localization project is using the same terminology, which helps to keep your brand message consistent across all of your content.

6. Use the right translation management system
No technology can help you if you use the wrong tools for the job, and similarly, many localization challenges can be avoided simply by choosing the right technological solution.

A crucial consideration when building your website localization toolkit is the TMS you will be using. If you want your website localization project to be as efficient and cost-effective as possible, you’ll need to carefully consider your specific needs and choose the best translation management system to support them.

Without a translation management system, your workflow will suffer, wasting time, money, and effort in the process. Lengthy email exchanges, transcription errors due to manually copying content into spreadsheets, developers wasting precious time to track down application strings and provide them to translators, and isolated data that’s difficult to report and monitor for quality… these are just some of the issues you may encounter without the right technology.

A robust translation management system will provide the following core features:

-Application programming interface (API) — for automation purposes. Developers can use it to automatically upload and download files for localization, extract translation keys, take screenshots, manage workflows, track performance, and so on.
-Collaboration functionalities — to ensure your project runs smoothly. You need to be able to effectively communicate with all the members of your team. Leave feedback, notes, comments, screenshots, and tags all in the same place.
-In-context translation directly on the page — so translators can work on your website in real time. This saves time (especially developer time), therefore speeding up the entire workflow and allowing you to see how your translated content will look on the website before it’s released.
-Translation memory — to speed up your projects and record any frequently used terminology. Your translation memory will also store all changes and allow you to easily look up older versions. Minimize repetitive manual tasks for all.
-Built-in glossary or terminology database — to guide localization efforts and ensure consistency throughout your content.
-Automated quality checks — to help you catch any potential problems before your content is published.
-Support for dozens of file formats — to ensure you can work with any content source.
-Integrations with other software — to seamlessly connect with popular platforms and services — content management systems, project management solutions, etc. — without the need for middleware.

Your translation management system will act as a project manager and coordinator all at once. When all your team members work in unison, you’re more likely to localize your website faster and at a lower cost.

7. Website internationalization
Internationalization is a process that aims to make your website “ready” for localization. More specifically, it ensures that the code is designed in a way that allows the website content to be easily translated into other languages without any technical issues.

When you internationalize your website, one of the key steps is to separate your “translatable” content from the source code. This means that all language-specific information is stored in separate files, which makes it possible to change the website’s language without changing the code. And it doesn’t stop there…

Website internationalization involves the following best practices:

-Encode your website content using Unicode (UTF-8) — to support special characters used in all languages across the world.
-Design and develop in a way that removes barriers to localization or international deployment (e.g., by ensuring that text can be resized without affecting the overall design)
-Provide support for features that may not be used until the website is deployed in another country (e.g., support for bidirectional text)
-Incorporate pre-defined localization data and features into your code (e.g., date, time, and number formats, currency symbols)
-Ensure that images in the UI don’t require separate files for each localized version of the application, instead, load dynamic images whenever possible.
-Use internationalization testing tools to test your website with real-world scenarios (e.g., verify that the automatic language detection feature is working as expected)

The goal of internationalization is to help you deploy your website in any market without having to rebuild it from scratch. A good analogy is designing a car that can run on all types of terrain-if you want to be able to drive easily on mountain roads as well as on sandy beaches, your car needs to have features that allow it to function well in both environments.

8. Localizing User Experience (UX) and User Interface (UI)
Excellent UX is half the success of your product: It impacts customer satisfaction, conversion rates, and sales. That’s why when you are planning your website localization project, it is important to consider how your localization efforts might affect UX.

Take the design of your UI elements, for example. The prior internationalization process will ensure that there is enough space to accommodate longer text strings in other languages. However, if the overall design of the UI isn’t suitable for users in other countries, you will still need to make adjustments.

For instance, you might need to rearrange some elements on the page, use different color palettes to avoid triggering unwanted cultural associations, replace some images with ones that are more representative of the target culture, or even redesign the user interface entirely for certain markets.

It’s also important to think about how your target audience uses the internet and the internet speeds in their country. If you are targeting users in a market with slower internet connections and lower-end devices, you should consider simplifying your UI design—for example, by using fewer images—so that it loads faster and runs more smoothly.

In short, localizing UX and UI means making sure users find your website easy to use, enjoyable, and tailored to their specific needs and preferences.

9. Testing Before Launch
After you’ve localized your website, it’s essential to test it thoroughly to ensure that all the words are translated correctly, that the user interface looks and functions as expected, and that there are no technical problems. Localization testing is about checking for both functional and linguistic accuracy.

Functional localization testing of the website focuses on:

-Encoding algorithms
-Hardware compatibility
-Names, times, dates, weights, measurements, etc.
-Upgrades
-Hyperlinks
-Image appropriateness
-Design
-Form functionality
-Shopping cart
-Payment processing
-Loading time

Linguistic localization testing of the website relates to:

-Spelling and grammar errors
-Punctuation errors
-Cultural appropriateness
-Keyword misuse
-Readability and appeal of a message
-Untranslated strings

A professional native speaker for the specific market with strong technical expertise and localization knowledge should be involved in the testing process. Then you can plan the testing, gather all relevant testing materials, set up the testing environment, and begin.

10. Marketing Your Local Website
Once you have your localized website up and running, you need to let your target users know that it exists, and that it is the perfect solution to their needs. That’s where localized marketing comes in. To successfully market your localized website, you need to consider how shopping habits, consumer behavior, and cultural norms vary between markets.

How can you expect demand for your product to rise in a foreign market if your advertising content feels like it’s targeting people in your domestic market? How can engagement increase if your social media posts don’t reflect the local culture and context? Why would potential customers waste their time filling out forms on your website if they can’t even understand your call to action?

To truly succeed in foreign markets, you need to speak the language of your target audience, both literally and figuratively. You need to know what makes them tick, what their pain points are, and how they want to be communicated with.

In other words, you need to localize your marketing efforts by considering the impact of culture, context, and language on your advertising strategy:

-The popularity of marketing channels such as social media, email, and search engines varies by country.
-Your content marketing may evoke different responses in different markets, what’s considered helpful and informative in one culture could be viewed as overly promotional in another.
-Calls to action, slogans, and other text that appear on your website and in your marketing materials need to be carefully tailored to fit local language and culture.
-Paid search keywords that are effective in one market may not be effective in another, we have seen that users in different markets search for the same thing using different terms.

All of these factors, and many more, need to be considered in your local marketing strategy. Whether you are looking to increase app downloads, drive website traffic, or improve your website dwell time, it’s all about creating a localized customer experience that resonates with your target audience.

Localizing your copy, getting local reviews and testimonials, optimizing for local communities, partnering with local influencers, are all great ways to start, as long as you take the time to understand how your target market is different from your domestic market. By following the tips outlined on how to localize your website, and ensuring that you keep your target market top of mind, you will be on your way to achieving global success.