Website localisation is often treated as a find-and-replace job: swap the English for French, ship it. Then the analytics come in and something odd has happened, traffic is up, conversions are flat, and nobody can explain why the French visitors bounce at the checkout page.
Because a website isn’t text. It’s a stack of decisions: how prices are formatted, whether dates read day-month-year, how much copy fits in a button once German doubles its length, which trust signals a German buyer expects versus a British one, and whether your cheerful tone lands as friendly or as flippant.
Imagery matters too. A stock photo of an American office tells a Dutch visitor you haven’t thought about them. A measurement in inches, a phone number in the wrong format, a form asking for “Zip Code”, each one is a small signal that this site wasn’t built for them.
Done properly, localisation is a structural job: glossary, tone guide, layout checks, cultural review, and native-speaker testing of the actual live flow. Do that, and the translated market doesn’t just visit, it buys.
– fin. Questions? Just ask.
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