If you could make your company website welcoming and easy to navigate for all of your customers, wouldn’t you do that? After all, isn’t user experience a top priority? Business owners take the time to ensure that their websites are easy to navigate. They post new content regularly, and they actively ensure that visitors have a safe and secure experience.
Entrepreneurs do many things when they create a business website, but how many of them prioritize multilingualism? The answer is not enough. That’s too bad, because this should be a priority. Let’s explore why.
Multilingual Websites Benefits
First, having a multilingual website allows you to reach a much wider audience. This of course can lead to more traffic and more conversions. It’s also been shown that when customers are presented with websites in their native language, two important things occur. The first is that it gives them a sense of trust. The second is that they are simply more likely to spend more money. It’s true! Customers will spend more money for the privilege of being able to shop and read in their native tongue.
Here’s something else to consider. If your competition hasn’t yet begun translating their web pages into other languages, you can gain some serious advantages over them. Why not take advantage of that.
Multilingual Websites And WordPress
WordPress is a popular business website builder and CMS. It’s extremely easy to use. In fact, many e-commerce sites have been set up on WordPress in just a few hours. In addition to ease of use, WordPress is very accommodating to businesses that wish to set up multilingual websites. They even provide a great tutorial for creating a multilingual website using a human translator. When you get a multilingual website, to keep it going, choose Wordpress maintenance plans afterwards. We are of course happy to assist anyone in building a multilingual WordPress site, or modifying an existing one to add multiple languages.
Anyone interested in keeping their business website cost low, while still appealing to a global market should consider this solution. Many have done so with great success.
Useful information: Check out localization services with expert linguists.
Tips For creating Multilingual Websites
If we’ve convinced you that multilingual is the way to go, wonderful! Here are a few tips to help you get started:
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Start with landing pages, product descriptions, and your checkout pages. These are the pages where your customers will most appreciate content in their native language. After that, tackle FAQ and customer service scripts.
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Know your customer base and the communities that you market to. It makes no sense to start with Spanish web pages when 40% of your target market is French Canadian.
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Don’t be tempted to use machine translation. You’ll have no control over accuracy or messaging.
A Few Multilingual Websites Best Practices on Culture
Creating a multilingual website is about more than language. In fact, language is just the beginning. Think of it this way. You created your business website as a way to get your messaging to your target audience, to build your brand, and of course to sell your products or services. You made a dedicated effort to be relatable and to establish trust.
If you are now going to tailor your website to new communities, new cultures, and possibly new countries, it’s quite possible that your messaging and branding can literally get lost in translation. It’s also possible that your messaging and branding will need to be modified in order to connect with new cultures.
Because of this, we strongly recommend employing the help of a professional website localization service. They will assist you in ensuring that your website is relevant to people in other cultures.
Conclusion
Don’t get left behind. The longer you wait to create a multilingual business site, the fewer customers you are reaching. It’s an easier process than you think, and The Word Point will help every step of the way.