10 лучших практик локализации веб-сайтов (с контрольным списком запуска)

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Website localization goes right when you decide market by market what each audience needs, translate and adapt the whole experience (text, formats, media, SEO metadata and checkout), give every language its own indexable URL, and keep testing after launch. It goes wrong when someone machine-translates the site once, hides the result behind a cookie or pop-up, and never checks it again.

The ten practices below are the ones we see making the difference on real multilingual sites. Each ends in something specific to do, so the list doubles as a checklist.

Ключевые выводы

• Pick markets from data you already have (traffic, sales, support tickets), then choose languages.
• Give every language a separate URL (subfolder, subdomain or domain) with hreflang tags, or search engines cannot rank it.
• Research keywords in each language; translated English keywords often miss what people actually type.
• Adapt dates, numbers, currency, addresses and images as well as sentences.
• Design for text expansion and right-to-left scripts before you translate.
• Use a glossary and translation memory so brand terms stay the same across languages and through updates.
• Review high-stakes pages with a native speaker, then measure each language separately.

Why localization is worth doing properly

People buy in the language they read. In CSA Research’s survey of 8,709 consumers in 29 countries, 76% said they prefer to buy products with information in their own language and 40% said they never buy from websites in other languages (CSA Research, 2020).

At the same time, English is only about half of the web. W3Techs puts English at 49.5% of websites whose content language it can identify, with Spanish (6.0%), German (5.9%), Japanese (4.9%), French (4.5%) and Portuguese (4.1%) next. So in most non-English markets, a well-localized site has fewer strong pages to beat than it would in English.

Локализация is broader than translation. Translation changes the words; localization changes anything a local visitor would notice as foreign. The practices below cover both.

1. Choose markets from evidence, not guesses

Start with the data you already own:

• In analytics, look at sessions and conversions by country and by browser language.
• In Search Console, look at impressions by country, including places where you rank poorly today. Those impressions are demand you are not capturing yet.
• In sales and support records, look for orders shipped abroad, tickets written in other languages, and questions about shipping or paying from specific countries.

Rank the candidate markets by demand and by how hard they are to serve (shipping, payments, legal requirements, support hours). Launch one or two languages, learn from them, and expand after that. A tenth language rarely pays back as well as getting the first two right.

2. Give each language its own URL

Search engines index URLs, not browser settings. If your translated version only appears after JavaScript runs or a cookie is set, Google may never see it. Google’s own guidance says it may not find all your variations when content changes by cookie or browser settings, and it recommends against adapting content by IP address (Центр поиска Google).

Use one of these structures:

Google lists URL parameters (?lang=de) as “not recommended.” Whichever you pick, add теги hreflang so each page points to its equivalents in the other languages, including itself. For a deeper comparison, see подкаталоги против поддоменов для многоязычного SEO.

3. Research keywords in each language

A translated keyword is a guess. Spanish speakers in Mexico and Spain may call the same product by different names, and German searchers often type compound nouns that a literal translation would never produce.

For each market:

1. Take your 20 most valuable English queries.
2. Ask a native speaker how they would search for the same thing, then check volumes in a keyword tool set to that country and language.
3. Look at the top results in that country (use a VPN or the tool’s location setting) to see which page types rank.
4. Put the winning terms into the translated title, meta description, H1 and first paragraph.

Our guide on translating SEO keywords for different audiences walks through this step by step.

4. Translate the parts search engines and shoppers read first

Visitors decide about a translated page within seconds, and search engines size it up from its metadata. Check that all of these are translated rather than left in the source language:

• Page titles and meta descriptions
• Изображение alt текст
• Navigation, buttons, form labels and error messages
• Structured data (JSON-LD) such as product names and FAQ answers
• Transactional pages: cart, checkout, account and order emails

When a translated site feels machine-made even though the body copy is good, untranslated buttons and error messages are usually why.

5. Adapt formats and conventions

Small format differences are enough to make a site feel foreign. Check each market for these:

• Dates. 03/04/2026 is 3 April in the UK and March 4 in the US.
• Numbers. 1,234.5 in English is 1.234,5 in German and Portuguese.
• Currency and prices. Show local currency only where you can actually charge in it, and be clear about taxes and duties.
• Addresses and phone numbers. Field order, postcode formats and country codes all differ.
• Units. Metric or imperial, plus clothing and shoe sizes.
• Forms of address. German has formal “Sie” and informal “du”, French has “vous” and “tu”. Pick one per market and use it everywhere.

6. Adapt imagery and cultural references

Photos, icons, colours and examples all carry meaning. If the payment page shows only US card logos, or the holiday campaign is built around Thanksgiving, or an idiom falls apart in translation, visitors can tell the site was not made for them.

Review every image that contains text (it needs a localized version), every screenshot (it should show the localized interface), and every cultural reference (sports, holidays, humour). Where a reference does not travel, replace it instead of translating it. That is the work транскреация is for, and it usually pays off on the homepage, the main landing pages and campaigns.

7. Design for text expansion and other scripts

Translated text is rarely the same length as the source. German and French strings often run longer than English. Chinese and Japanese are often shorter but need different line breaking and font sizes. Arabic and Hebrew read right to left, so the whole layout mirrors.

Before translating, check that:

• Buttons and menus grow with their text instead of truncating it.
• Headlines are not set in fixed-height boxes.
• Fonts include the characters your languages need (accents, Cyrillic, CJK).
• Your CSS uses logical properties (margin-inline-start а не margin-left) if you plan to add right-to-left languages.

After translating, open every main template in every language and look at it. Reviewing on the live page in a visual editor is much faster than reading text in a spreadsheet.

8. Keep terminology consistent with a glossary and translation memory

A multilingual site that calls the same product three different things looks patched together. Two tools prevent most of that:

• A glossary sets out how brand names, product names and other important terms are translated, or says they are never translated.
• A translation memory stores approved translations and reuses them whenever the same sentence comes up again, so an edit you make once applies everywhere.

Set both up before you translate at scale. Retrofitting them is harder. Our articles on создание глоссария локализации и память переводов cover how to start.

9. Combine machine translation with human review

Machine translation today is good enough to publish most informational content, and it keeps a site in sync as pages change. It is not good enough to publish everywhere without anyone checking. A split that works in practice:

• Machine translation with spot checks for blog archives, help articles and long-tail product pages.
• Native-speaker review for the homepage, pricing, checkout, legal pages, top landing pages and anything customers quote back to you.
• Transcreation for slogans, campaigns and brand stories.

Have your team review in context, and give reviewers clear roles so that one person approves each language instead of everyone editing everything. For more on quality control, see our рабочий процесс качества перевода.

10. Launch, then measure each language separately

One site-wide traffic line hides problems. After launch, split every report by language or market:

• In Search Console, filter by page path (/de/) and by country, then check impressions, clicks, CTR and indexing for each language folder.
• In analytics, compare conversion rate, bounce and revenue per language as well as sessions.
• In technical checks, look for hreflang errors, pages indexed in the wrong language, and translated pages still canonicalised to the English version.

Then fix the biggest gap first. High impressions and low CTR usually mean weak translated titles; good traffic and low conversion usually point to prices, payment methods or trust signals that were not localized. Our guide to многоязычная SEO-аналитика lists the reports worth setting up.

A launch checklist you can copy

• Markets chosen from analytics, Search Console and sales data
• One URL per language (subfolder, subdomain or domain) with hreflang
• Keyword research done in each target language
• Titles, meta descriptions, alt text and JSON-LD translated
• Dates, numbers, currency and address formats adapted
• Images with text and cultural references replaced
• Layouts checked for text expansion (and right-to-left if needed)
• Glossary and translation memory set up
• High-stakes pages reviewed by a native speaker
• Reports segmented by language, reviewed monthly

How ConveyThis handles the technical side

Several of these practices are technical, and a website translation tool should handle that part for you. ConveyThis translates a site into any of 210 languages and publishes each language on its own URL: subfolders, subdomains or ?lang parameters, with second-level domains available on the Extreme plan. It adds hreflang tags automatically and translates page titles, meta descriptions and JSON-LD, which covers most of practices 2 and 4.

For quality and consistency (practices 7 to 9), you get a visual editor to review translations on the live page, a glossary, translation memory, and team roles so reviewers and translators can work per language. If you are moving from another tool, CSV and TMX import lets you bring existing translations with you. Words are only counted when a translated page is actually shown to a visitor, and bot traffic does not count.

The страница цен lists what each plan includes. The Free plan covers one language and 5,000 words, which is enough to test a small site.

Часто задаваемые вопросы

What is the difference between translation and localization? Translation converts text from one language to another. Localization adapts the whole experience for a market: text, formats, images, prices, payment methods, legal content and SEO metadata.

How many languages should I launch with? Start with the one or two markets where your analytics or sales data already show demand. Do those well, measure the results, and add more after that.

Is machine translation good enough for website localization? For most informational pages, machine translation with spot checks is good enough, and it keeps content in sync. Review your homepage, pricing, checkout and legal pages with a native speaker.

Do I need hreflang tags? Yes, if the same content exists in more than one language or region. Hreflang tells search engines which version to show to which audience, and it stops your language versions from competing with each other.

To try it on your own site, создать учетную запись ConveyThis and translate your first language. It takes a few minutes.