International ecommerce

How to translate the cart and checkout pages in WooCommerce

How to translate the cart and checkout pages in WooCommerce
Merve Alsan
Written by
Merve Alsan
Merve Alsan
Written by
Merve Alsan
Reviewed
Merve Alsan
Reviewed by
Updated on
June 19, 2023

The cart and checkout pages are the last few pages that a customer goes through when buying something from your online store. They’re also super important – if the customer doesn’t click through these pages to submit their order, then you will have lost a sale. Even if the customer had spent time adding stuff to their cart!

If you have a multilingual WooCommerce site, this means that you absolutely shouldn’t neglect to translate your cart and checkout pages. Because if you’ve nicely displayed your whole store in a customer’s preferred language, except for your cart and checkout pages, then you may throw your customers off. They’ll be confused over why your store is suddenly presented in a foreign language, and be unsure what to do next.

The result? They’ll abandon their cart and buy what they want somewhere else. The hard work you’ve poured into marketing and product development will have gone down the drain.

Having your WooCommerce cart and checkout page in just one language can work in the beginning when you have only one target audience. But as you expand your customer base – possibly even abroad – you’ll need versions of these pages in your new audiences’ preferred languages. This article will explain how you can translate your WooCommerce cart and checkout pages to achieve this goal, as well as some best practices to follow along the way.

Why translate your WooCommerce cart and checkout pages?

As mentioned above, translating your WooCommerce cart and checkout pages helps your customers understand what’s going on on these pages – and accordingly, what they should do to complete their order. And in the process, you enjoy benefits such as:

  • Reaching more customers: Some of your existing customers may be more proficient in a language other than the default one for your store. Making your cart and checkout pages available in this language(s) can make them more accessible to these customers. Likewise, if you’ll be venturing into international markets, and the customers in these markets don’t speak the language(s) in which you currently offer your store pages.
  • Improving the user experience: When people can read and understand the contents of your cart and checkout pages, they’ll be able to navigate these pages easier. This leads to a smoother, easier, and more pleasant user experience.
  • Increased conversions: When you’re able to reach more customers, and more customers can understand your cart and checkout pages (as per the previous two points), then you’ll be able to funnel more customers toward placing orders with you. Accordingly, you net yourself more conversions and sales!

Want all this for yourself? Of course, you do. So let’s take a look at:

How to translate your WooCommerce cart and checkout pages

While WordPress is a great website platform that offers many features out of the box, multilingual capabilities isn’t one of them. However, WooCommerce is translation-friendly, so your options for translating your WooCommerce cart and checkout pages include:

Doing a manual string translation

For a more DIY approach, you could use the POEdit translation file editor to do manual string translation. In other words, you’ll use POEdit to identify strings of text in your cart and checkout pages, then use a free translation tool such as Google Translate to translate these strings one by one.

However, this method can be more technically challenging. It may involve the creation of .po files and .mo files, and uploading them to a specified folder in your website’s wp-content directory using an FTP client. Consider if you’re up to the task, especially if you have beginner-level knowledge of web development.

Apart from that, if you’re using Google Translate, bear in mind that it doesn’t always give accurate translations. To increase the quality of your translations, you could hire a team of professional translators to manually translate each WooCommerce string in your cart and checkout pages. That said, their services aren’t cheap. Try our website translation cost calculator to get a feel of how much it might cost to hire professional translators for your ecommerce store.

Finally, if your store pages contain large amounts of text, expect to spend quite a bit of time translating each string individually. This is regardless of whether you use Google Translate or professional translators for manual translation.

Using Weglot to translate your WooCommerce cart and checkout pages

Compared to doing a manual translation, the easier and quicker approach to translating your WooCommerce cart and checkout pages is to use our Weglot translation solution. It offers three different layers of translation features:

  1. A first layer of high-quality machine translation using a proprietary mix of machine learning translations that is constantly being improved upon.
  2. A collaborative layer where you invite your staff to your Weglot translation project for team edits and further translation refinement.
  3. A final layer of professional translation and review by ordering translations from trusted Weglot translation partners, right from the Weglot dashboard!

To use Weglot to translate your WooCommerce cart and checkout pages, register for a Weglot account and install the Weglot WordPress plugin on your WordPress website. Specify the original language of your store and destination languages into which you’d like to translate your WooCommerce cart and checkout pages, and Weglot will translate all the text in these pages – such as your web page copy, coupons, search engine optimization (SEO) metadata – instantly.

That’s the first layer of translation done. From the Weglot dashboard, you can then add team members to your Weglot project, or order professional translations, as per the next two layers of translation:

Add a new member to your Weglot translation project

Here’s a neat tip when tweaking your translations – use the visual editor in the Weglot dashboard to preview your edits on your store pages. By doing so, you can better understand how your translations will appear on your website. This is handy for checking if you need to change your website’s design to accommodate the translations.

Also, you may find it worthwhile to tap on Weglot’s translation glossary. With it, you can save rules on how certain words and phrases should always be translated. This helps Weglot translate such text according to your preferences – every single time. In turn, you will also enjoy greater translation consistency across your entire store.

weglot-glossary

Finally, if you have images or even videos in your cart and checkout pages, use Weglot’s media translation features to specify replacement media URLs for them. For instance, if you have an image containing English text, you can provide a replacement image URL pointing to the same image – but containing French text instead – to be shown to French-speaking customers.

Best practices for translating the WooCommerce cart and checkout pages

Before you wrap up your WooCommerce cart and checkout translation work, use these best practices to get the most out of your efforts:

  • Go one step further than translation with localization: Check that your store pages have been localized, i.e., completely adapted, for the local market. For example, you can enable multi-currency support for your store for showing prices in your customers’ native currencies.
  • Simplify your cart and checkout pages: Don’t make customers complete pages of checkout forms, or dozens of form fields, to submit their order. The more hoops you make them jump through, the more likely they will abandon their cart. Try to keep the number of mandatory checkout form fields to a minimum.
  • Ensure a smooth buyer’s journey: Allow customers to check out as a guest instead of forcing them to sign up for an account. The latter creates additional friction that can turn off customers from completing their orders entirely.
  • Install a language switcher: Let customers conveniently toggle your store to their preferred language using a language switcher. Weglot comes with a language switcher where you can customize how it displays your languages (e.g., in a list or dropdown format), language flags, and more.
  • Get feedback on your translations from locals before making your translated WooCommerce checkout page live. They might just spot some cultural issues with your translations that you aren’t aware of, and save you from potential embarrassment!

Start translating your WooCommerce checkout and cart pages with Weglot

If you want your WooCommerce store to cater to customers who speak multiple languages or a language different from yours, then translating your store pages is a must. And this includes the translation of your cart and checkout pages. As the final few pages in the customer journey, they can make the difference between customers submitting their orders or leaving your store empty-handed.

While you could translate your WooCommerce cart and checkout pages using manual string translation, this approach is more technically complex, slow, and time-consuming. It could also be expensive if you decide to hire professionals to translate all your WooCommerce strings from scratch.

In contrast, the quicker and more budget-friendly option is to use a website translation solution like Weglot. Our no-code platform integrates seamlessly with WordPress sites like yours to instantly deliver high-quality translations in over 110 languages. Weglot’s collaboration features also make it easy to work with your team and external agencies to perfect your store translations.

Weglot is used by over 60,000 websites in all industries, including large and small ecommerce stores alike. Sign up for a free trial to experience firsthand how Weglot can help translate your WooCommerce cart and checkout pages today.

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