Skip to main content
Eldris Website
Quote
How it works

How to translate a website without losing the rankings you already earned

Most translation projects bleed organic traffic for six months because hreflang gets botched, machine output reads like a hostage note, or migration breaks 40% of internal links. We do it differently — and we ship in 10 days, not 10 weeks.

See pricing Talk to us
The pipeline in numbers
5
Steps from audit to ongoing care
10 days
Starter — single language live
14 days
Growth — full multi-language
28 days
Scale — 25 pages, four languages
Process

Five steps. Done in days, not months.

Website translation isn't a translator job — it's an engineering, content and SEO job stitched together. We compress what most agencies stretch into three months into a 10-day sprint, with one team owning every layer. Here's the exact sequence we run, in the exact order it has to happen.

  1. Site audit

    Day one and two are diagnostic. We crawl every URL on your existing site, map your top 50 ranking pages from Search Console, score each page for translation priority, and flag the structural problems that always surface — orphan pages, broken redirects, duplicate metas, thin product copy. You finish day two with a complete inventory: pages worth translating now, pages to retire, and pages that need a content rewrite before any translator touches them.

  2. Translation engine

    We run a hybrid stack: DeepL for the first pass on bulk product copy, Claude for nuance on landing pages and brand voice, then a native human reviewer for every single page before it ships. No raw machine output ever reaches your domain. For German, French, Italian and Spanish, our reviewers are in-country natives who understand the commercial register your buyers actually read — see /professional-website-translation/ for the review standard.

  3. Hreflang & indexing

    This is where 80% of DIY translation projects fail. Every translated page gets a reciprocal hreflang cluster (en-GB ↔ de-DE ↔ fr-FR), a self-referencing canonical, and a clean entry in your XML sitemap. We submit the sitemap to Google Search Console on launch day, request indexing on your priority pages, and monitor coverage for 30 days. Botched hreflang is the single biggest cause of duplicate-content penalties — see /data-centre/separate-domains-translated-websites/.

  4. Migration & launch

    We build your translated site on managed Eldris hosting, then cut over with a 301 redirect map covering every old URL — including legacy product pages, deleted blog posts and parameter URLs. DNS swap happens during a low-traffic window. Most clients see zero traffic gap because we keep the old site live in shadow mode for 14 days. SSL, GDPR cookie banner and EU privacy policy ship configured on day one.

  5. Ongoing care

    New blog post in English on Tuesday, translated and live in German, French, Italian, Spanish by Friday — that's the cadence on Growth and Scale. Your monthly fee covers content sync across every language, hreflang validation as you add or remove pages, broken-link sweeps, hosting, SSL renewal, and a quarterly SEO review on Scale tier. Translation isn't a one-off project; it's an operating system.

The honest version

Translation isn't a translator job — it's an engineering, content and SEO job stitched together. We compress what most agencies stretch into three months into a 10-day sprint, with one team owning every layer.

Decide first

The translation paths that actually work.

Before you sign anything, decide which path you're actually buying. The translation industry blurs three completely different products under one word, and the wrong choice will cost you either rankings, conversions, or both. Here's how to pick — and what translation alone won't fix.

Three real paths

Path one is pure machine — Google Translate widget, free, two-minute install, and a 73% drop in conversion rates because nobody buys from a site that reads like an instruction manual. Path two is hybrid AI plus light editing — DeepL or Claude output, lightly cleaned, around £0.04 per word, decent for product catalogues. Path three is hybrid plus native review — what we ship — every page touched by a human in-country before it goes live. See /translate-my-website/ for the full five-path comparison.

  1. The cost-quality-time triangle

    Pick two. Pure human translation costs £0.12-£0.18 per word and takes 6-8 weeks for a 50-page site — premium quality, premium price, slow. Pure machine is free and instant but the quality cliff is so steep your bounce rate doubles. Hybrid plus native review sits at roughly £0.04-£0.06 per word, ships in 10-14 days, and matches human-only quality on 95% of commercial copy. That's the sweet spot — see /website-translation-cost/ for per-word breakdowns.

  2. What translation actually covers

    When we translate a website, we translate eight layers, not just the visible body text. Page titles and meta descriptions. H1-H4 headings. Image alt text. Product attributes and variants. URL slugs (configurable). Email transactional templates. Navigation menus and footer. Schema markup fields like Product name, description and brand. Miss any one of these and your translated site is technically multilingual but commercially crippled — see /ecommerce-website-translation/.

  3. What translation does NOT replace

    Translation gives you readable pages. It does not give you a German payment processor, a French VAT registration, an Italian EPR number, or a Spanish cookie banner that satisfies AEPD. If you're an FBA seller shipping into the EU, you also need an EU Responsible Person and country-by-country EPR registration before you sell a single unit — that's a separate workstream we run via epr.eldris.ai. Translation is the front door; compliance is the foundation.

What you keep

Existing rankings preserved through the cutover. Hreflang correct. SEO intact.

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

How do you translate a website without losing rankings?

Three things keep rankings intact. First, reciprocal hreflang on every page — en-GB points to de-DE, de-DE points back to en-GB, with self-referencing canonicals so Google sees them as language alternates rather than duplicates. Second, a complete 301 redirect map from every legacy URL to its new equivalent on launch day, including parameter URLs and deleted pages. Third, native human review of titles, metas and H1s — machine-translated metas trigger thin-content flags and tank click-through rates by 30-50%. Done correctly, most clients see ranking recovery within 21 days and net traffic uplift within 90 days as the new language versions accumulate impressions.

Should I use machine translation or human translation?

Neither, on its own. Pure machine translation (Google Translate widget) tanks conversion by 60-75% because the output reads as untrustworthy — buyers leave within 8 seconds. Pure human translation costs £0.12-£0.18 per word and takes 6-8 weeks for a typical 50-page ecommerce site, which kills your launch timeline. The right answer in 2026 is hybrid: DeepL or Claude for the first pass on bulk content, then a native in-country reviewer for every page before it ships. That sits around £0.04-£0.06 per word, ships in 10-14 days, and matches human-only quality on commercial copy. See /data-centre/is-deepl-good-website-translation/ for the AI tier deep-dive.

How long does website translation take?

On our pipeline: 10 days for Starter (5 pages, 25 posts, 10 products, single language), 14 days for Growth (12 pages, 100 posts, 25 products), and 21 days for Scale (25 pages, 200 posts, 75 products). Multi-language doesn't add proportional time because translation runs in parallel — adding French to a German project costs roughly 3 extra days, not double the timeline. Compare that to traditional agency timelines of 8-16 weeks for the same scope, and you understand why we built this. The bottleneck is review capacity, not raw translation throughput.

Will Google penalise me for duplicate content across language versions?

Not if hreflang is implemented correctly. Translated pages are not duplicate content under Google's guidelines — they are language alternates, and the hreflang tag tells Google which version to serve which user. The penalty risk emerges in two specific scenarios: when hreflang is missing or one-directional (en-GB points to de-DE but de-DE doesn't point back), or when machine-translated content is so poor Google classifies it as auto-generated spam under the SpamBrain update. Both are avoidable. We ship reciprocal hreflang clusters on every page from day one — read /data-centre/google-translate-website-risks/ for the full duplicate-content risk profile.

What if I only have an English site today?

That's actually the cleanest starting position. We migrate your English site to managed Eldris hosting, translate it into your target languages in parallel, and ship everything live on the same day under one consolidated hreflang cluster. No legacy decisions to unwind, no half-broken WordPress multilingual plugin to rip out, no conflicting SEO history to reconcile. For a typical FBA seller expanding from US/UK English into Germany, France, Italy and Spain, the entire migration plus four-language launch lands at £997 + £149/mo on Growth tier, with the 4-language bundle activation discount applied. Most clients are live in 14 days from kick-off.

Ready to translate without breaking what works?

Migration, native human review, hreflang and hosting in one fixed package — Starter from £497 + £99/mo, Growth at £997 + £149/mo with 24-hour support, Scale at £1,997 + £249/mo with quarterly strategy. Every tier ships in 10-21 days, not 10 weeks.

See pricing Talk to us
Ready when you are Translating into five EU languages?
Get a quote