How to Translate Entire Website

Summarize this post with: 15 min read

ChatGPT Perplexity Grok Google AI

To translate an entire website and keep it translated, you need a system rather than a one-off job. Put your site behind a translation layer, either a website translation service or a plugin for your CMS, that finds every piece of visible text, translates it automatically, serves each language at its own URL, and picks up new or changed content without you exporting files again. Then have a person review the pages that matter most: the homepage, pricing, checkout and legal pages. Browser translation and one-time agency files can’t do this on their own. The browser version is invisible to search engines, and the files go stale the first time you edit a page.

This guide covers the main methods, what “entire” really includes, the SEO setup, and how to keep every language in sync as the site changes.

The ways to translate a whole website

There are four basic approaches. Most sites that stay translated long-term end up with a fifth, which combines two of them.

The rest of this guide explains the trade-offs behind that table. If you want a click-by-click walkthrough instead, see how to translate a website step by step. For a side-by-side of specific tools, see our website translation software comparison.

Browser translation: what your visitors can already do

Every major browser can translate a page on the fly:

• Chrome (desktop and Android) offers to translate a foreign-language page in a bar at the top, or you can right-click and choose “Translate to [your language]”. You can also tell it to always translate a given language.
• Safari (macOS and iOS) shows a translate icon in the address bar on supported pages.
• Edge prompts at the top of the page and lets you switch the target language from the translation bar.
• Firefox has built-in translation, and extensions add more options.

This is useful for a visitor who lands on a site in a language they can’t read. It is not a way to translate your website, for three reasons:

1. Nothing gets indexed. The translation happens in one visitor’s browser. Search engines never see a French or Japanese version of your pages, so you get no search traffic in those languages.
2. You have no control. You can’t fix a wrong term, protect your brand name, or check that a translated button still fits its space.
3. Some things are skipped. Browser translation works on text in the page. Text baked into images isn’t touched, and some dynamic elements may be missed or translated inconsistently.

Some site owners used to paste Google’s free “Website Translator” snippet into their pages to add a translate dropdown. Google is ending support for that widget on October 1, 2026, and points site owners to its Cloud Translation API instead, which is a developer tool, not a finished multilingual website. We cover the migration options in what to use instead of the Google Translate widget.

Translation services and proxies

A website translation service sits between your site and your visitors. You add a plugin, an app, or a script. The service detects the text on each page, translates it with machine translation, stores the result, and serves it to visitors under a language-specific address such as example.com/fr/. Because the translations are stored and served at real URLs, search engines can crawl and index them, and you can edit any sentence.

The big practical advantage is that this approach works on the live site. You don’t copy pages, export files, or build a second website. When you publish a new product or blog post, it is detected and translated like everything else.

Multilingual CMS plugins

Some CMS plugins create a separate copy of every post and page for each language inside your CMS. That gives developers fine control, but it multiplies your content. Every new page means another page per language, and themes, page builders and third-party plugins each need their own translation handling. It works well when you have the time to manage it. It gets hard to keep up as the site grows. Some services, ConveyThis included, also ship as a CMS plugin but keep the translations outside your database. From a site owner’s point of view, that behaves like the service model above.

For WordPress specifics, see how to translate a WordPress website. For stores, see adding multiple languages to Shopify.

Human translators and agencies

Professional translators handle context, tone, idiom and cultural nuance better than any machine, and a good agency builds in proofreading. The downsides for a whole website are time, cost, and the fact that the result is a snapshot. You export content, wait for files, and paste them back in. The next time someone edits a page, that language is out of date, and nothing tells you. For a site that changes weekly, human-only translation tends to fall behind within months.

The cost side is covered in detail in how much it costs to translate a website.

The hybrid approach: machine translation first, people where it counts

For most sites the efficient answer combines the two. Let machine translation cover every page so nothing is left in the wrong language. Then spend human review time only where a mistake would cost you:

• Always review: homepage, pricing, checkout and cart messages, sign-up and contact forms, legal pages (terms, privacy, returns), and your top landing pages.
• Spot-check: product and category pages, especially titles and key specs.
• Usually fine as machine output: long-tail blog posts, help articles, archive pages. Check a sample for each language.

Reviewers can be your own bilingual staff, a freelancer, or an agency. The important part is that they edit inside the same system that serves the site, so their fixes stick and are reused. If they work in a separate spreadsheet, each fix has to be copied back by hand. Machine quality varies by language pair and subject. We look at where it holds up and where it doesn’t in human vs machine translation and how accurate Google Translate is.

What “the entire website” really includes

Most half-translated sites have a translated body text and English everywhere else. Before you call a site translated, check each of these in every language:

• Navigation: main menu, footer links, breadcrumbs, mega-menus and mobile menus. See translating a WordPress menu if you’re on WordPress.
• Buttons and microcopy: “Add to cart”, “Read more”, tooltips, cookie banners, empty-state messages.
• Forms: field labels, placeholders, validation errors, and the thank-you message after submission.
• E-commerce flow: product titles and descriptions, variant names, cart, checkout, shipping and tax notices, order confirmation pages.
• Images: alt text, which search engines and screen readers read, and any image that contains words. Text inside an image has to be replaced with a per-language image or rebuilt as real text.
• Metadata: page titles, meta descriptions, Open Graph and social tags, and structured data (JSON-LD) such as product names.
• Dynamic content: text loaded by JavaScript after the page opens, pop-ups, chat widgets, search results, reviews and filters.
• New pages: everything you publish after launch. This is where most sites slip. See the section on keeping things in sync below.
• Things outside the page: PDFs, transactional emails and third-party embeds are often handled by other systems. List them and decide on each one.

Also decide what should not be translated: your brand name, product names, code snippets and some legal terms. A good tool lets you set these as glossary rules once, so they stay correct on every page.

Translation vs localization

Translation changes the words. Localization adapts the whole experience to the market. You don’t need full localization everywhere, but know which pages need it.

For stores, localization often includes showing prices in a familiar currency and making sure you actually ship to the countries whose language you now speak. Translating a store into a language whose customers can’t buy from you creates support tickets, not sales.

SEO: make every language a real, indexable page

A translated site only brings search traffic if search engines can find each language version. Google’s guidance for multilingual sites comes down to a few rules:

1. Give each language its own URL. Google recommends different URLs for each language version rather than switching language with cookies or browser settings on a single URL. The common structures are subdirectories (example.com/de/), subdomains (de.example.com) and country domains (example.de). Google lists URL parameters (?lang=de) as an option but does not recommend them.
2. Add hreflang annotations. These tell search engines which pages are translations of each other. Each language version must list itself and all the other versions, and an x-default can point to the fallback page. Missing return links are the most common reason hreflang gets ignored. Our hreflang guide walks through it.
3. Translate the metadata, not just the body. A French page with an English title tag and meta description looks broken in French search results.
4. Translate the whole page, not only the template. Google warns that translating only the boilerplate while the main content stays in one language creates a poor experience.
5. Don’t force visitors into a language. Google advises against automatically redirecting users from one language version to another. Suggest a language if you like, but let people choose, and put a visible language switcher on every page.

A note on machine translation and rankings: Google does not penalize machine translation as such. Its spam policy on scaled content abuse targets using automated transformations, translation included, to generate many pages “where little value is provided to users.” In practice, translate pages that are genuinely useful in the target language, review the important ones, and fix obvious errors. Don’t publish unreviewed translations of thin pages in dozens of languages just to catch search traffic.

More on this in our multilingual SEO tips and on the multilingual SEO page.

Keeping translations in sync as the site changes

Launching a translated site is the easy part. Keeping it translated is where most projects fail.

The classic failure is running a separate copy of the site for each language. It starts well. Then the main site gets a new pricing table, a new product line and twenty blog posts, and the Spanish copy still shows last year’s offer. Nobody notices until a customer complains. Anything that relies on someone remembering to update another version will drift.

What keeps a whole site in sync:

• Automatic detection of new and changed text. The translation layer should notice new pages and edited sentences on its own and translate them, without an export-import cycle.
• Translation memory. Once a sentence is translated or corrected, it’s reused wherever that sentence appears. You fix “Free shipping over $50” once, not on 400 product pages.
• A glossary. Brand names, product names and preferred terms are applied consistently across every page and every future page.
• Edits in one place. A visual editor, where you click text on the live page and correct it, shows fixes in context. You can check that a longer German button label still fits instead of overflowing.
• Roles for reviewers. Translators and reviewers get their own access to the languages they own, without admin rights to the whole account.
• A review routine. After big launches, check the key pages in each language. Once a quarter, sample a few random pages per language. See improving your website translation workflow for a fuller process.

How ConveyThis translates an entire website

ConveyThis is a website translation service built on the hybrid model above. The company was founded in 2008 and has translated more than 20,000 websites.

Setup. You connect your site with the WordPress plugin, the Shopify app, one of 35 platform integrations, or a small script that works on any website. You choose your original language and target languages from 210 supported languages. The step-by-step version is in how to translate a website.

Translation. ConveyThis detects the visible text on your pages, including menus, buttons, forms, checkout text, image alt text and metadata, and translates it with machine translation. New and changed content is picked up as pages are viewed, so new posts and products don’t need a separate project.

SEO. Each language is served at its own URL. You can use subfolders (/fr/), subdomains (fr.example.com), a ?lang= parameter, or, on the Extreme plan, separate domains. ConveyThis adds hreflang automatically and translates meta tags and JSON-LD structured data. We recommend subfolders or subdomains over the parameter mode, for the reasons in the SEO section.

Quality control. You can edit any translation in the visual editor, set glossary rules for terms that must stay fixed, and rely on translation memory to reuse corrections. You can invite your own translators, colleagues or agency with team roles, so human review happens in the same place the site is served from. If you’re moving from Weglot or Bablic, you can import existing translations as CSV or TMX instead of starting over. More detail is on the translation quality and features pages.

Cost. Plans are priced by words and languages. Words are counted only when translated content is shown to visitors, and bot traffic doesn’t count. There’s a free plan for small sites (5,000 words, one language), and paid plans start at $12 a month. The Starter plan is $12 a month. See pricing for the full list. To estimate how many words your site has before choosing a plan, use the free word counter.

To be honest about the limits: no tool translates text baked into images. Those images still need per-language versions. Content outside your pages, such as emails from your store platform or downloadable PDFs, is usually handled elsewhere. Machine translation also needs human review on pages where tone or legal precision matters.

Frequently asked questions

Can I translate my entire website for free?

Your visitors can translate any site for free in their browser, but that doesn’t give you indexed, editable translations. Free website translation plans exist, ConveyThis’s included, but they cap words and languages, so they suit small sites or a trial of one language.

How long does it take to translate a whole website?

With a translation service, the first machine translation of a typical site is ready within minutes to hours of setup, depending on size. Human review takes longer. Plan it page by page, starting with the pages that make you money.

Is machine translation good enough for my whole site?

For most informational pages in widely used languages, modern machine translation is a solid first draft and often good enough to publish. For your homepage, checkout, legal pages and campaign copy, have a fluent person review it.

Will translating my site hurt my SEO?

Not if it’s set up properly: one URL per language, hreflang, translated metadata, and translations that are useful to real readers. Duplicate-content worries mostly come from untranslated or half-translated pages, not from proper language versions.

What happens when I add new pages?

With a service that detects content automatically, new pages are translated when they’re first viewed in each language. With agency files or per-page CMS copies, someone has to remember to translate every new page. That’s the most common reason multilingual sites drift out of date.