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In a survey commissioned by DeepL, 96 percent of business leaders report a positive ROI from localization. If your site currently publishes in a single language, that opportunity is closed off by default. This isn’t because the product or service isn’t relevant to other markets, but because the experience isn’t built for them. I’m going to walk you through a website localization tutorial that can help you get multilingual in the right way.
Alongside the tutorial, it’s also going to show you some real-world businesses that get localization right. In fact, there’s plenty to look at, so let’s start with some of the basics.
What website localization is
In short, website localization is the process of adapting your site for multilingual visitors so that they have an experience that feels native to them. This is regardless of where they are browsing from or which language they use:
- Translation simply converts text from one language to another.
- Localization adapts the full experience: date and number formats, currencies, units of measurement, cultural references, images, and the second-person address conventions that vary between languages and between regions within the same language.
This distinction matters more than it might first appear. For instance, Spanish-speaking visitors in Spain and in Mexico read the same language, but they expect different pricing conventions, potentially different product availability, and different second-person grammar. The same applies to European Portuguese versus Brazilian Portuguese. A localization strategy treats these as distinct audiences rather than interchangeable ones and plans for the differences from the outset.
The benefits of a website localization strategy
There are three main reasons to invest in a localization strategy. The first is user experience. If your site receives traffic from multiple regions or languages, a visitor landing on a page that hasn’t been adapted for their market gets a worse experience than a visitor in your primary one. This has a direct effect on your conversion rate, so localization is how you can close that gap.
The second is reach through multilingual SEO. A site in Spanish with properly localized pages, translated metadata, language-specific URLs, and correct hreflang tags can rank for organic search queries in Spanish independently of your English content. Localization investment builds search traffic over time rather than serving only your current audience.
Finally, market expansion is how you hit new markets through adapting your existing content for it rather than building a new site from scratch. Localization adapts to the expectations of that market, which is different from simply making your existing content legible in another language.
Website localization examples: three approaches that work
Looking at businesses that handle localization well gives you a clearer picture of what a strategy looks like at execution. Here are three of the biggest, along with what they’ve done right.
Square: regional variants within the same language
Square is one of the most instructive localization examples because it demonstrates that language alone doesn’t define a locale. Because it’s a payment processing platform, its localized sites need to account for differences in currency, regulation, payment infrastructure, and product availability across every market it serves.
For instance, its Spanish-language site for the United States shows dollar pricing throughout:
In contrast, its Spanish-language site for Spain shows Euros: even down to the receipt visible in one of its product images, which updates for the region.
The product range presented also differs between the two, because the tools Square offers vary by what’s available and approved in each country. Beyond content, Square adds a region selector in the footer and uses IP-based redirection so visitors land on the right version by default. This combination of content adaptation, design adaptation, and automatic routing is what a great full localization strategy looks like.
Etsy: localization as a multilingual SEO strategy
Etsy arguably has the ‘lock’ on localized SEO. For instance, it’s common to see Etsy’s localized pages appearing at the top of search results for the same category query in multiple languages, with each version attracting organic traffic the other couldn’t.
When a visitor arrives, Etsy presents a popup for confirming or adjusting language, region, and currency, with automatic redirection based on browser settings already applied. Once settings are confirmed, the entire experience adapts: translated content, local currency, date formats, and number conventions all update together.
The result is a localization strategy that works on two levels simultaneously. It serves existing visitors better and also builds search presence in markets the site otherwise couldn’t reach.
Netflix: localization built into the content strategy
Netflix treats localization as part of how it builds its audience globally rather than a step applied after content is created. The platform offers subtitles and dubbing in dozens of languages. More significantly, it commissions original productions written, directed, and cast locally. It’s content that travels internationally precisely because it feels native to its local market first.
This localization extends to the interface. Netflix adapts the thumbnails and recommendations displayed to users based on regional and individual preferences, meaning the same title can present differently depending on where it is accessed.
The approach shows how cultural adaptation is as much a part of localization as anything else. It also illustrates what’s possible when localization is part of the product rather than a layer on top of it.
How to develop your website localization strategy
A localization strategy gives you the decisions you need to make before you begin translating. Next, I want to give you some tips and tricks to plan your own out. Afterwards, I’ll show you how to actually do it using TranslatePress.
List the languages and locales you want to cover
The first step is deciding which languages and regions to target. It’s worth treating this as two separate questions. For starters, languages and locales don’t map one-to-one: Spanish is spoken across 22 countries; Portuguese is the official language of nine.
So, if you target Spanish speakers, you need to decide early whether to publish a single Spanish version, separate versions for Spain and Latin America, or something more specific.
With the Square example, it maintains a Spanish-language site for the United States and a separate one for Spain because currencies, products, and market context differ between them. That level of granularity isn’t necessary for every site, but understanding how language and locale are independent variables from the start saves you from restructuring things later.
Your existing traffic data is the most useful starting point here. Markets that already send visitors to your site have demonstrated interest, so investment in those markets is more likely to produce a measurable return.
Choose how to translate your content
Translation is the most labour-intensive part of any localization effort, for which there are two approaches:
- Human translation through a freelance translator, an agency, or someone on your team produces the most natural results. For marketing copy, product descriptions, or any content where tone carries weight, human review is difficult to replace. The limitation is time and cost, particularly for large sites with frequent content updates.
- Machine translation through services such as Google Translate, DeepL, or TranslatePress AI produces a complete working draft across your full content set quickly. However, machine translation can sometimes struggle with context-dependent language such as idiomatic phrases, culturally specific references, and short isolated strings.
The practical workflow for most WordPress sites is to generate a machine translation baseline, then bring in a human reviewer. However, you still need the right solution to generate those quality translations in the first instance.
Pick a plugin for your WordPress site
Managing a multilingual WordPress site without a dedicated plugin means handling hreflang tags manually, writing custom URL rewrite rules for each language, managing translation files by hand, and rebuilding that infrastructure every time a theme or plugin updates. It’s possible, but it’s slow to maintain and prone to error.
A localization plugin handles this infrastructure automatically. TranslatePress creates SEO-friendly URLs for each language, adds hreflang tags to both your page HTML and XML sitemap, translates metadata, and integrates with SEO plugins including Yoast SEO, Rank Math, and AIOSEO. It also lets you localize images and media through the same interface.
TranslatePress Multilingual
There are plenty of other plugins and solutions, but the key takeaway is that you should settle on this early. This is because it affects every decision you make afterwards.
Create a localization style guide
A style guide captures the localization decisions that need to stay consistent across your site. At the practical level, this means documenting the following for each target locale:
- Date and time formats. For example, DD/MM/YYYY versus MM/DD/YYYY, and 12-hour versus 24-hour time.
- Number formats. Periods versus commas as decimal and thousands separators.
- Units of measurement. Metric versus imperial and the specific units standard in each market.
- Currency display conventions. Not just the currency symbol, but how prices are formatted.
- Address conventions. How to write and format postal addresses, which differ a lot between countries.
A style guide should also document the cultural considerations relevant to each market. For example, if you’re localizing for an audience in India, references to beef consumption may be insensitive or inappropriate. If your site uses sports references or idioms, those may need replacing rather than translating. Collecting these decisions before you begin translating prevents inconsistencies from building up across a large content set.
The style guide is also where you document the correct second-person form for each locale. In Spanish, Spain uses vosotros while Latin America uses ustedes. In Portuguese, Brazil uses você as the default informal second-person, while Portugal uses tu. Documenting the right choice per locale before translation begins means you don’t have to find and correct it across hundreds of strings after the fact.
Plan for design changes
Translating content changes its physical length. Languages expand and contract relative to English in ways that affect button labels, navigation items, and any text constrained by its container. German typically expands from English, while Japanese and Chinese often compress it. Navigation items and CTAs have the least room to flex.
A solid plan is to review each translated version after the first pass and look at constrained design elements specifically: menu items, button labels, hero headings, and column headers. TranslatePress’s visual editor makes this straightforward because you’re looking at the live front end while editing, so layout problems surface immediately.
How to localize your WordPress site for similar languages: a hands-on tutorial
The hardest localization problems don’t arise between wildly different languages, such as English and Japanese. It’s actually due to languages that share enough structure to make shortcuts seem reasonable, then differ in ways that cause real problems.
For example, Spanish and Portuguese share Latin roots, thousands of vocabulary items, and similar grammatical structures. A translator who knows one can navigate much of the other. However, they also have ‘false cognates’. These are words that appear identical between the two languages but carry different meanings.
I’m going to work through a scenario where a WordPress site is targeting Spanish and Portuguese speakers. It uses auto-translation used to generate a baseline and the visual editor used to catch what auto-translation doesn’t. Throughout, you’ll understand where your own localization strategy could be worthy of greater attention.
1. Add your target languages as separate entries
First off, go to Settings → TranslatePress → General within WordPress. Under All Languages, use the drop-down menu to add each language variant you need:
- Spanish (Spain)
- Spanish (Mexico)
- Portuguese (Brazil)
- Portuguese (Portugal)
TranslatePress treats each regional variant as an independent language with its own translation set. So, translations for Brazilian Portuguese have no effect on European Portuguese, and Español de España has no shared translation set with Español de México. This independence is key as each variant can be corrected without overwriting another.
Once you save your settings, you can go to the Automatic Translation tab to select a different translation engine. TranslatePress will have already carried out machine translation, so saving your changes means it will regenerate the translations.
2. Open the visual editor and review the output
If you click Translate Site in the WordPress toolbar, you can open the TranslatePress translation editor to see how your localized site looks on the front end:
With an active language switcher you can move between variants. Also, you can click any text element on the page to select the underlying string and open its translation fields in the left-hand sidebar: you’ll see a separate input for each active language.
For content that auto-translation handles well, such as straightforward informational text and navigation labels, the output is usually usable with minor edits. However, you’ll need to dig into fixing some of the predictable, yet common problems.
3. Find and correct false cognates
Modern translation engines actually handle false cognates well in full sentences. They typically use the surrounding text as context and select the correct equivalent. However, context can’t protect against a couple of issues:
- Using the Spanish version of a page as the source for Portuguese to manually copy strings across rather than translating from the original English. It’s a common shortcut when the languages look similar enough to seem interchangeable.
- Short, isolated strings (such as alt text, category labels, button copy, image captions) where the engine has little or no context to work with. The shared vocabulary between Spanish and Portuguese makes a direct ‘carry-across’ look plausible.
Here’s a practical example for any food, supplement, or wellness store: in Spanish, polvo means powder, and it appears in product copy constantly – polvo de cacao, polvo de maca, polvo proteínico. However, in Portuguese, polvo primarily means octopus.
Given a full sentence such as “polvo de cacao orgánico”, a good machine translation engine produces “cacau em pó orgânico” and reads the context and converts correctly.
A product image alt tag that reads only “polvo de cacao” in Spanish, pasted into the Portuguese field as-is, has no surrounding context. In this case, a Portuguese speaker reading your alt text is being told your product is “organic cacao octopus”!
Here’s a second example with broader application: exquisito in Spanish means exquisite or delicious. It’s a positive product qualifier used regularly in marketing copy and category naming. In Portuguese, esquisito means strange or odd. When the word appears in a full product description, an engine reading “sabor exquisito” produces “sabor requintado”.
If this is a category label or navigation item that reads only “Exquisito” and is transferred directly into the Portuguese field, you’ll be telling your Portuguese visitors they’re browsing a “Weird” or “Strange” section.
How to find false cognates in TranslatePress
You can use the search functionality within the Translation Editor, or work through your product images, alt text fields, and short UI strings in the visual editor.
Here, click the element, check the Portuguese translation field, and correct any instance where a Spanish term has been carried across unchanged. It’s one scenario where a human review could be the difference between sales and an embarrassing reputation.
4. Handle regional address conventions
Regional differences within Spanish and Portuguese affect the grammar of how you address visitors directly. These appear in CTAs, button labels, checkout instructions, product guides, form copy, and any string that speaks to the reader in the second person.
In Spain, the second-person plural is vosotros, with its corresponding verb forms. In other Latin American countries, it is ustedes. So, a CTA that reads naturally in Spanish can sound archaic and out of place in Mexico or Argentina.
Portuguese works the same way. In Brazil, você is the standard informal second-person singular across most contexts. In Portugal, tu is the norm for informal address. A checkout instruction that addresses the visitor directly needs different verb forms in each version.
Because these are separate languages in TranslatePress, you can set each independently in the visual editor without affecting the other.
This is where you’ll want to work through your site’s conversion points and look for short, repeated strings. Correcting them once in the editor covers most of your site’s address convention exposure.
5. Enable Translation Memory to maintain consistency
If you go to TranslatePress → Advanced → Miscellaneous options you can enable the Automatic Translation Memory option.
With this active, TranslatePress automatically applies your manual corrections to new strings that are 95 percent similar to ones you have already edited. For a site with product descriptions that follow a consistent structure, a correction you apply to one string propagates to matching strings without additional manual work.
Note that Translation Memory runs before auto-translation in TranslatePress’s processing order, so your manual corrections take priority over the engine for any string it recognises. This makes it the right tool for maintaining false cognate corrections and address convention changes across new content added after your initial localization pass.
Frequently asked questions about website localization strategy
Before this post wraps, I want to run through some common questions surrounding your own localization strategy and the planning. Of course, this can’t cover every remaining question, so use the comments section at the end of the post to ask your own!
What is the difference between website translation and localization?
Translation converts text from one language to another. Localization adapts the entire website experience for a specific market. This includes translation, but also covers formats, currencies, cultural references, regional address conventions, imagery, and any other element that affects whether the site feels appropriate and natural for its target audience.
How many languages should I target?
Your existing analytics are the most useful starting point. Markets that already send you visitors are good candidates for localization as you could see a quicker return. Once you have performance data from your first localized versions to guide the next decisions, you can expand to new markets.
Do I need a translator to localize a WordPress site?
Not for a first working version. TranslatePress generates a machine translation baseline across your full content set, which you can then review and refine through the visual editor. For marketing copy or any content where tone carries real weight, human review will be an improvement on the auto-translation. However, the baseline means a translator is editing rather than starting from scratch, which reduces both time and cost.
What are false cognates and why do they matter for website localization?
False cognates are words that appear identical or near-identical between two languages but carry different meanings. Between Spanish and Portuguese, they are a reliable source of errors when Spanish content is manually adapted into Portuguese rather than translated from the original source, and when short isolated strings are translated without surrounding context. In both cases, the similarity between the languages makes the error invisible until a native speaker reads the output.
How do I handle Spanish for Spain versus Spanish for Latin America in TranslatePress?
Add each as a separate language within TranslatePress as it maintains independent translation sets for each variant, so Español de España and Español de México are translated separately. You can apply the correct second-person grammar (vosotros forms for Spain, ustedes for Latin America) without one version affecting the other.
Start building your localization strategy today
A sound localization strategy is what separates a site that has only been translated from one that has been genuinely adapted for a market. Translation is the largest part of the work, but the decisions around which languages and locales to prioritize, how to address visitors correctly in each one, and how to handle the specific friction points between similar languages are what determine whether localized content performs.
TranslatePress gives you the tools to work through all of it from a single interface. You can generate baseline translations automatically, review and correct within the visual editor, and manage regional variants as independent translation sets.
TranslatePress Multilingual
Does this website localization tutorial help you take the first steps into a new market? Let me know in the comments section below!
