Localization and translation

Customers all over the world enjoy viewing content in their native language. Translating your store's content can lead to more sales because your international customers can better understand your marketing, product details, shipping, and return policies. Learn more about selling cross-border.

You can activate multiple languages from your Shopify admin to create separate URLs for your translated content. When customers land on a translated URL, your store automatically displays the translated version if translations exist.

Requirements

To sell in multiple languages, the following must be true:

Your store is on the Basic Shopify plan or higher.
Your active theme is a theme that's compatible with selling in multiple languages. All the free themes from Shopify are compatible. You might need to update your theme for it to be compatible with selling in multiple languages. If you're using a third-party theme, then you can contact your theme developers to check if it's compatible.
Your active theme has a language selector. If you're using another theme or an older version of the theme, then you can add a language selector using the Geolocation app by Shopify.
Your store uses the Shopify Translate & Adapt app or a compatible third-party translation app. Alternatively, you can follow the instructions to import your translations directly into Shopify.

URLs and SEO

A major aspect of selling in multiple languages is making sure that customers and search engines can find the right language version of your site. When you publish a language, unique URLs are created for each translated page in your store. This is done by adding the language code to the URLs.

For example, suppose your primary domain is example.com. If you publish two additional languages, French (fr) and German (de), then your store URLs will change to example.com/fr and example.com/de.

You can also have different languages available on different domains by using the international domains feature in International.

URL slugs can be translated manually with the Shopify Translate & Adapt app, a compatible third-party translation app, or via CSV export/import.

It's important that search engines can index your site in all the translated languages. Shopify automatically adds hreflang tags, and includes all published languages in sitemaps, which help search engines detect the different languages on your store.

Translations in apps

If you use third-party apps, then it's possible that those apps don’t support selling in multiple languages by default. To check whether an app supports multiple languages, contact the app's developer.

Limitations of selling in multiple languages

Only compatible third-party translation apps are supported by this feature.
Tags (such as product tags, article tags, and blog tags) can't be translated.
URL slugs, such as /products/en-ca/shoes can be translated into /products/es-mx/zapatos but the word products cannot be translated
URL slugs cannot be customized for markets. Translations can only be added for URL slugs on all markets where a language is visible.
When translating to languages that are written from right to left such as Hebrew or Arabic, check that your theme supports right-to-left languages, to ensure that the layout is correct.

Changing the default language of your online store

After you change the default language of your online store, your previous default language is removed from Settings > Languages. If you want to set the previous default language as your secondary language, then you need to add it back to your markets and Settings > Languages.

Learn more about managing languages.

Multi-language for developers

To help Shopify partners offer a fully multi-language experience and localize app workflows, Shopify is launching a set of new platform capabilities for selling in multiple languages.