Netflix's Localization Strategy: What Your Website Can Learn

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Netflix’s localization strategy comes down to five habits. It expands one market at a time. It treats language as part of the product from the start. It writes strict style guides for every language. It hands specialist work to specialists once that work outgrows the company. And it localizes what people see (artwork, interface, metadata) as well as what they read. A business website can copy each of these.

Below is what Netflix did, with sources, and how each lesson applies to your own site.

Key takeaways

• Netflix launched outside the US for the first time in Canada on 22 September 2010, a market close to home, before expanding further.
• Today Netflix says it entertains “over half a billion people in more than 190 countries and 50 languages.”
• In the second half of 2025, non-English titles accounted for more than a third of all viewing on Netflix.
• Netflix publishes detailed style guides for each language, written for its subtitle and dubbing partners.
• It built its own translator-testing platform (Hermes) in 2017, then shut it down in 2018 and handed recruiting and training to vendors.
• It personalizes artwork for each viewer, so the same film gets different thumbnails for different people.

1. Start close to home, then expand

On 22 September 2010, Netflix launched in Canada, its first market outside the United States, with a streaming-only service at C$7.99 a month (Engadget, 2010). Canada shared a language (in most provinces), a time zone and many viewing habits with the US. That let Netflix learn how to license content, set prices and market abroad without taking on much risk.

Today the company describes its reach as “over half a billion people in more than 190 countries and 50 languages” (Netflix).

What this means for your website:

• Launch your first translated version where you already see the most demand. Check analytics by country and browser language, and look at where orders and support requests come from today.
• Get one language right (keywords, metadata, checkout, support) before you add the next.
• Write down what the first launch taught you. That list becomes the checklist for the second.

Our list of website localization best practices turns this into a step-by-step plan.

2. Treat language as part of the product

Netflix did not stop at English content with subtitles. Its engagement report for the second half of 2025 says “non-English language titles accounted for over a third of all viewing, with Korean, Spanish and Japanese shows and films among the most-watched” (Netflix, January 2026). For Netflix, local-language content makes up a large share of what members watch.

For your website, that means translating the whole journey rather than stopping at the homepage:

• Navigation, buttons, forms and error messages
• Product pages and pricing
• Cart, checkout and account pages
• Transactional emails and help content
• Page titles, meta descriptions and structured data, so the translated pages can be found in search

If the homepage is in Spanish and the checkout is in English, you lose the customer at the most expensive point.

3. Write down how each language should sound

Netflix publishes a general Timed Text Style Guide for subtitles plus separate language-specific guides, and asks partners to follow the general, language-specific, timing and file-type rules together (Netflix Partner Help Center). The language guides go as far as how to write Korean and Chinese names, because viewers notice inconsistency.

Your website needs a smaller version of the same thing:

• A glossary of brand names, product names and other important terms, with the approved translation for each language (or a “do not translate” rule).
• A short style note for each language covering formal or informal address, how to write prices and dates, and preferred spelling (Brazilian or European Portuguese, for example).
• A translation memory, so an approved sentence is reused every time it comes up.

See our guides to building a localization glossary and translation memory.

4. Know when to hand work to specialists

In March 2017, Netflix launched Hermes, an online test to find and index subtitle translators. A year later, in March 2018, it shut Hermes down. As Slator reported, Netflix program manager Allison Smith explained that the company had decided “vendors were better suited to use their core competencies and add value to the content localization ecosystem by owning the recruiting, training and onboarding processes,” and Netflix moved that work to around ten localization vendors (Slator, 2018).

Netflix had the engineers to run a translator platform and still decided that recruiting and managing translators was a poor use of its own time. It kept control of the standards (the style guides) and let vendors do the execution.

What this means for your website:

• Keep ownership of the rules: which languages, which pages, which terms, what tone.
• Automate the work that does not need a person, such as detecting new content, translating it, keeping language versions in sync and generating hreflang tags.
• Spend human time where it counts most: reviewing the homepage, pricing, checkout and campaigns, and adapting slogans that do not translate literally (transcreation).

5. Localize what people see as well as what they read

Netflix’s technology blog describes how it chooses different artwork for the same title depending on the viewer. Its example is Good Will Hunting: a member who watches many romantic films may see artwork featuring Matt Damon and Minnie Driver, while a member who watches comedies may see Robin Williams (Netflix TechBlog, “Artwork Personalization at Netflix”, 2017). The first image someone sees often decides whether they click.

What this means for your website:

• Replace images that contain text with localized versions, or remove the text from the image.
• Use photos, examples and payment logos that fit the market (local payment methods, local holidays, local units).
• Check that longer translations still fit your buttons and menus. German and French strings are often longer than English.
• Review screenshots of your product so they show the localized interface.

6. Design for every language from the start

Serving 50 languages means an interface has to cope with long German words, right-to-left scripts such as Arabic and Hebrew, and Chinese, Japanese and Korean characters. A website has the same problems on a smaller scale, and a few rules prevent most of them:

• Buttons and menus that grow with their text instead of truncating it
• No text in fixed-height boxes
• Fonts that include every character you need
• A visual review of each key page in each language before launch

Putting it together: a Netflix-style plan for a business website

How ConveyThis helps you apply these lessons

ConveyThis covers the parts of this plan that should be automated. It translates your site into any of 210 languages, keeps translations in sync as your pages change, publishes each language on its own URL (subfolders, subdomains or ?lang), and adds hreflang tags and translated titles, descriptions and JSON-LD for search.

For the parts that need people, there is a visual editor to review translations on the live page, a glossary and translation memory to enforce your terms, and team roles so a reviewer or agency can own each language. You can start with one language on the Free plan (5,000 words) and see all plans on the pricing page. Our translation quality workflow explains how to combine machine translation with human review.

Frequently asked questions

What is Netflix’s localization strategy? Netflix expanded gradually, starting with Canada in 2010. It invested in local-language content and in careful subtitling and dubbing, gave its partners detailed style guides for each language, and personalizes artwork and recommendations for each viewer.

How many languages does Netflix support? Netflix says it entertains more than half a billion people in more than 190 countries and 50 languages.

What was the Netflix Hermes test? Hermes was an online subtitling and translation test Netflix launched in March 2017 to find qualified translators. Netflix shut it down in March 2018 and moved recruiting and training to its localization vendors.

What can a small business learn from Netflix’s localization? Start with one well-chosen market and translate the whole customer journey. Keep a glossary and style notes, automate the work that does not need a person, and localize images and examples along with the words.

When you have picked your first market, create a ConveyThis account and translate your site. It takes minutes.