Woocommerce multilingual for large shop is possible?
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Hello everyone, my first post here, and it’s a bit desperate. I love WordPress. I love Woocommerce. I love Rank Math for SEO management. I have 1 language stores that are going great. But I have a store (still in Staging) with 4 languages, 7k products, and each product with about 3-7 variations. I have tried all or almost all the language plugins: WPML, Polylang, TranslatePress, Weglot, MultilingualPress. And I have only seen 2 that work well for production activation, in terms of features and functionality: WPML and MultilingualPress.
But I don’t like any of those 2 scenarios.
WPML. As you can imagine, very slow. Very low performance in both backend and frontend. The wp_posts table with 177k records and the wp_postmeta table with 7.3M records and wp_term_relationships with 715k records. No blog yet. Only products. I guess this volume of data makes SQL queries slow. The web is on a dedicated server exclusively for that web, still in Staging (no real traffic), with 4 CPUs, 8GB of memory, SSD, OpenLiteSpeed, LS-Cache, Redis, etc… On the other hand, the database has been optimized, adding more INDEXES to improve the queries, and although there have been improvements, they are insufficient. Results: loads up to 16 seconds. Then when caching the page, it goes faster, but it is not viable either. I have not contacted WPML support, because seeing messages in the WPML forum from other users with similar problems to mine, I know what they are going to tell me, and the problem will not be solved. I can’t post links. But google this topic in the forum “A large woocommerce site + WPML is extremely slow, the culprit seems to be WPML“
MultilingualPress, what to say? The little I have tested it, it seems to work fine. And the performance seems similar to Woocommerce 1 language only. But… What problem do I see? That the result, in terms of functionality, is like having independent Woocommerce. If you have a store in 4 languages, you have 4 different backends through which you can enter orders. There is no central backend with all orders together from all languages. And the other problem I see is that if you update, for example, prices, you have to go to each backend to update the price. And if you have variations, then the administration of that store can be hell. I think MultilingualPress for a blog should be perfect, but for Woocommerce I think it lacks basic functionality to be operational with a large store.
Now I don’t know what to do. This store, in Staging, is a migration from Prestashop 1.6. A store in production. I need to migrate from PS 1.6 because is not maintaned anymore. I should update to PS 1.7 or PS 8.0. I don’t like Prestashop very much (this is another story, but now it adds nothing.), but I have to admit that the language management is perfect in that CMS.
What can I do? Do I continue with MultilingualPress and eat all the extra administration work to keep the store up to date? Do I continue a little longer with Prestashop and wait for WordPress to release the multilanguage in the core? In 1 year maybe? Did I forget about Woocommerce? I can’t use Shopify or BigCommerce. I need a self-hosted solution. AND I WOULD LOVE TO USE WORDPRESS / WOO.
If anyone has been in my situation, it would help me a lot to know what solutions they took or at least know their experience. Thank you very much. ??
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Hello. I understand your pain even with my 2 languages; Finnish main language (Woocommerce + Loco translate works fine for this) and extra language in English. I have few hundred products that are added and deleted regularly. They are divided in about 10 categories and products in same category has same product texts – only basically name changes between products.
I tried some translators that creates multiple backend pages ( WPML, Translatepress ? etc. can’t really remember all of them) and they are really not an option. You need to go through products one by one and translate them. What a nightmare. Also doesn’t like the duplicated content. Maybe works for blogs and Woocommerce with only few products, but not in your and my situation.
So far bests have been translators that do the translation in their servers and send it back to visitor on the fly. You do not need to edit anything under the products in Woocommerce. They automatically translate content and you can (=need to) edit it manually in their web interface. Also there is nice editor where you can see your actual web page and edit different texts / buttons etc. through it.
My saviour has been that I have for example 100 products with same text and another 100 with same text etc. Once I edit one product then the other 99 are translated also! It recognises same text and paraghraps so I need to go through different texts only once. I think you might not be this lucky and you have different text under each product?
Weglot did quite nice job but price is based on language quantity and translated words count – and this counting is broken on their side. My website has about 6000 words that really need to be translated and rest is just copy of the same paraghaps. Still it counts like 10 000+ words and keeps increasing even when content stays the same which is ridiculous. Why wouldn’t it if the pricing is based on that…
Gtranslate I am testing at the moment and it works same way as Weglot but there is no word limit and pricing is a lot better. But there is huge issues to make the Woocommerce Cart to work. If you add products and delete them the Cart will show wrong products etc. – it doesn’t update immediately as should. Also there is some settings need to be done to server files manually (remove caching and allowing some priviledges that Gtranslate need to be able to work) so it is not working out of the box. I had year ago same issues when I tested it so no progress…. So really not Woocommerce compatible. I am checking it with their support and hopefully they make it to work this time.
Does anyone else know similar options than these two mentioned above?
WordPress / Woocommerce really should have built in feature to be able to have separate languages.
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