Translate my website — five paths, only one fits SMB ecommerce

The decision is driven by monthly revenue and operational bandwidth, not by language preference. Below £50k MRR, Path 2 (self-managed Weglot or WPML at £15-£50/mo) usually wins because the conversion uplift from premium translation does not yet cover the activation cost. Between £50k and £500k MRR ecommerce, Path 5 (done-for-you managed) is mathematically obvious — a 15% conversion lift on a six-figure run rate pays back the £997 activation in 30-90 days. Above £500k MRR you choose between Path 4 (traditional agency with in-house dev support) and our Scale tier on custom scope. Amazon FBA sellers expanding to the EU should always run Path 5 because translation, EPR registration and hosting must move together. Pure Path 1 (Google Translate widget) is only acceptable for hobbyist sites where nobody buys anything.

Three layers have to ship together for a German translation to actually rank and convert. First, the translated content itself — German commercial register is more formal than English, and machine output without native review reads as untrustworthy to German buyers, who bounce within eight seconds. Second, reciprocal hreflang — en-GB points to de-DE, de-DE points back to en-GB, with self-referencing canonicals on each. Third, the URL structure — typically a /de/ subdirectory or a de.yoursite.com subdomain, with German slugs translated, not transliterated from English. We ship all three on Path 5; on Path 2 you configure them yourself. On our managed pricing the German clone is the same tier as your English site minus a 15 percent sibling-clone discount — adding German to a Growth client is £847 activation plus £127/mo. See /translate-website/ for the full sequence.

Shopify ships native multilingual support via Markets, which handles routing and hreflang at the platform layer — that solves about 40% of the problem. The remaining 60% is translation quality, ongoing product sync, and metafield coverage. Shopify's built-in translation app uses raw machine output, which sinks conversion. The right stack on Shopify is either Weglot or Langify (Path 2) for under £50k MRR, or our managed service on Path 5 above that revenue. We integrate via Shopify's GraphQL Admin API, translate every metafield including SEO meta and product variants, and sync new SKUs within 48 hours of you publishing them in English. See /data-centre/translate-shopify-store/ for the integration spec.

Yes, on Path 1 or Path 2, with caveats. Path 1 (Google Translate widget) takes five minutes and ships zero SEO value — fine for a personal portfolio, fatal for ecommerce. Path 2 (self-managed plugin) takes a competent technical owner roughly two to four weeks to configure properly across hreflang, slug translation, metafield coverage and ongoing sync, then a continuous operational load every time you publish a new product or blog post. The honest question is what your time is worth. If you bill £200/hr in your day job, spending 60 hours configuring WPML across four languages is an £12,000 hidden cost — at which point Path 5 at £997 activation becomes the cheaper option. See /website-translation-cost/ for the per-hour breakdown.

Per-word freelance rates run £0.08 to £0.30 depending on language pair and translator seniority — German and French sit at the top, Spanish and Italian closer to the middle, Mandarin highly variable. For a typical 50-page ecommerce site at roughly 25,000 words, that's £2,000 to £7,500 for raw translation alone, before you handle hreflang, hosting migration or ongoing sync. Hybrid AI-plus-native-review pipelines like ours cost roughly £0.04-£0.06 per word equivalent because the AI handles bulk processing and the native reviewer corrects rather than translates from scratch. Including migration, hosting and 12 months of ongoing sync, our Growth tier lands at £997 + £149/mo for a 12-page site across one language. See /website-translation-cost/ for the full per-tier maths.