Translate your BigCommerce website

If you’re a BigCommerce user who’s looked at going international, you’ve probably noticed that the platform doesn’t have a native multilingual feature. There are several tricks, such as using Google Translate script, to translate your BigCommerce store—but none of these back-alley solutions really provide efficient, consistent results.

This is why we developed a simple way to use Weglot to make a clean, crisp, multilingual store on BigCommerce, using specific subdomains for each language to keep your store well-indexed on search engines.

Let’s translate your BigCommerce website

Ready to go global? This guide explains how to make your store multilingual for an international reach.

10 minutes

1) Create an account on Weglot

Your Weglot account is where all your translations will be stored, and where you’ll be able to manage them. Simply create a Weglot account here:

2) Enter your domain URL, original and translated languages

Once your Weglot account has been created and confirmed, you will see the following screen appear.

Simply enter your domain URL, your website’s original language (the one you created it in) and the target languages you want to translate your website into.

(You can change your translated languages later if you want.)

Important: DO NOT enter your BigCommerce temporary domain (ending with .mybigcommerce.com)

(Don’t have a domain name yet? Scroll down on your Weglot setup page, where you’ll see another section called “Other possible integrations”. Click on “Use Javascript integration” and jump directly to step 4 of this guide.).

3) Configure the subdomains in the DNS records

Enter the DNS records that are shown to you in your DNS Record Zone. Depending where you bought the domain, these records may be available to you in one of several places:

• If you bought the domain through BigCommerce, it’ll be in Server Settings > Email & DNS Records.
• If you bought your domain on an external provider (like GoDaddy, 1&1, Gandhi,…), you’ll be able to find them directly on your account dashboard on the provider site. Generally, it will be marked under “DNS Settings” or “DNS Records,” and a similar-looking table will appear, with editable rows.

(This part can be a bit tricky if you have an external domain name. If you need any help along the way, you can send us an email to support@weglot.com with your BigCommerce admin access, and we will do it for you!)

Once you have entered the DNS, wait a few minutes. Your Weglot dashboard page should eventually look like this, with green checks indicating the validated DNS entries:

4) Install the Weglot library

Copy the Javascript code that is shown to you on your Weglot account:

Once back in your BigCommerce admin dashboard, go to Storefront > Script Manager and click “Create Script.”

Enter whatever name and description you’d like, and fill in the rest of the data as follows:

• “Location on Page” : Head
• “Select pages where script will be added” : All pages
• “Script type” : Script
• Script Content : Here, you paste the code from your Weglot account

Finally, click “Save”.

5) You’re all done!

You just need to wait a few minutes for BigCommerce to display your language-switch button, and that’s it—your multilingual website is now live! 

Use the language-switch button to change the version of your website. You can manually edit all of your translations via your Weglot account dashboard, too, under the “Translations” tab on the left-side menu bar.