How to translate a theme with Weglot app

For Shopify store owners, it’s no surprise that at some point in time the idea of adding multiple languages to your site might become a topic of discussion.

Why? Because adding multilingual capabilities to your ecommerce store increases your global reach, improves your organic traffic and offers a level of personalization for your international store visitors that ultimately improves your over all conversion rate.

So, it’s no surprise that multilingual is in the pipeline for many Shopify store merchants.

Therefore, in this post we’re going to show you how to add multiple languages to your Shopify store no matter what theme you’re using, with Shopify translation app Weglot.

Choosing your Krown theme

Firstly, you’ll need a Shopify theme to actually add languages in the first place! Luckily, for Krown theme users you’ve got three standout themes to choose from in the shape of Highlight, Split and Kingdom.

This gives you an immediate professional store front where you can appeal to the masses. You’ll then of course want to upload your products and populate your pages before we move on to the next step.

Now let’s get translating.

How to add multiple language with Weglot

1. Add the Weglot app

On your Shopify admin navigate to the Shopify App Store and search for Weglot. Once you’ve found Weglot, click on ‘Add app’.

2. Create a Weglot account through the app

Next, create an account with Weglot. This will give you access to your Weglot Dashboard where you’ll manage all your translations.

3. Add languages

Then you’ll be prompted to fill in the original language on your Shopify store and the languages you want to add.

Click on ‘Save’ and your Shopify store is now multilingual! You’ll see a front-end language switcher has been added to your store and when you switch between languages you’ll see your multilingual store live.

4. Multilingual SEO subdomains

The final stage is to set up language specific subdomains (for example: https://fr.mywebsite/) to ensure your Shopify store is easily searchable by international visitors.

To do that, simply navigate to the admin of your domain name provider and the area where you can manage your DNS.

Then follow this simple, fast tutorial to add new CNAME entries.

Once you’ve added and saved your entries go back into the Weglot app section in your Shopify dashboard and follow the simple setup instructions after you’ve clicked on the ‘Activate subdomains’ button.

Then you’re all set! You now have a multilingual Shopify store that follows multilingual SEO best practices.

Managing your translations

Weglot uses machine translation to translate your Shopify store. For many Shopify owners this is enough to give them the desired language capabilities they strive for. However, some prefer to edit the translations themselves.

Weglot gives you full control over your machine translations, allowing you to manually edit them, add teammates to help or even order professional translators directly inside the Weglot Dashboard.

It’s completely down to your brand decision how much you want to edit your store translations, many Weglot users choose to use a hybrid approach and leave some pages machine translated and other pages they manually edit them.

To make edits, you have two choices, the first option is through your translations list where you see your translations side-by-side. Here you simply click on the translation, make a change and that’s automatically live on your Shopify store.

The second option is to edit visually through the visual editor, this allows you to edit translations within the context of your website, so you can see exactly where each translation is.

Simply click on the blue pencil icon and make a change in the box, once you click okay the translation is automatically updated on your site.

Final Thoughts

Translating your Shopify Krown theme allows you to expand your reach and put your business in front of new audiences. Using the right Shopify translation app, you can have an instantly multilingual website in minutes. The only thing you need to decide on is whether you want to edit your translations.