Leveraging powerful localization solutions for both text and visual media, you can create a personalized experience that aligns with your visitors’ regional and cultural preferences and can increase your sales by a jaw-dropping 40-50%.
Using WPML, the most popular multilingual plugin for WordPress; Cloudinary, an API-based image and video platform; and the Cloudinary WordPress plugin, you can easily translate your website’s text into your readers’ native language and replace images and videos with more relevant alternatives, providing visitors with a completely localized experience.
In this blog post, we’ll show you how to translate your website’s text and localize images and videos to create highly targeted, fully optimized, and fast-loading visual experiences that will improve conversion rates and increase revenue.
The first step in localizing text and visual media is choosing your target audience. By targeting a specific audience, you’ll later be able to create relevant shopping experiences that resonate with your customers, build trust, and increase conversion rates.
For the purpose of this post, we’ll use an imaginary clothing brand, Fabrina, that wants to expand into the Chinese market.
To offer our target audience a fully localized experience, we’ll use WPML to localize our image and translate texts. We’ll start with the translation part.
To translate with WPML, go to WPML > Translation Management and select the pages we want to translate.
Next, we’ll choose a translation method. With WPML, you can translate automatically by yourself, with your team of translators, or with translation services.
To speed up our translation process, we’ll start by automatically translating our entire page, and follow up with a human review to make sure the translations are accurate.
Once done, our new translated page will appear on the website when switching languages. The last step is localizing our product image to fit our target demographic.
Localizing visual media, especially on big sites, can quickly take up a lot of our available storage and slow down our site.
To avoid this, we’ll use Cloudinary Assets, Cloudinary’s API-first digital asset management (DAM) platform, to store our visual media in the cloud, and use the free Cloudinary WordPress plugin to optimize any visual media that we serve on our site. Cloudinary automatically delivers the asset at the highest possible quality, smallest file size, and optimum file type (including cutting-edge formats like AVIF, JPEG-XL, HEIC, and WebP) by formatting to the user’s device, browser, and connection speed.
With this setup in place, even big multilingual sites with multiple languages can localize visual media without compromising quality or their user experience.
To localize images, we’ll need WPML’s free add-on, Media Translation. With this extension, we can easily upload an alternative image for every image served on our site.
Once saved, the new localized image will appear on our translated page.
Videos are a great way to showcase products on our website, which is why we included one on our homepage.
To align with our ongoing localization strategy (localize visual media and translate texts) we’ll start by translating our homepage using WPML’s Translation Management.
Next, to localize our video, we’ll edit our translated homepage and upload our alternative video from Cloudinary and replace the original.
Because video files are typically large and can negatively impact page load speeds and overall site performance, Cloudinary also automatically optimizes videos to ensure the best quality is delivered at the lowest file size, so you’ll never have to worry about device types, resolutions, video formats, or video codecs.
Once updated, our new localized, fast-loading video will appear on the translated homepage.
Localized experiences help you connect with readers more effectively and build trust – a key component in any successful business. Using WPML, Cloudinary, and the Cloudinary WordPress plugin, you can easily expand your business into new markets without sacrificing quality, site performance, or user experience.
Need some more information? Cloudinary’s documentation hub will have you covered.
About WPML
WPML makes it easy to build multilingual sites and run them. It’s powerful enough for corporate sites, yet simple for blogs.
In 2007, we started our journey by offering website translation services. As the approach to translation solutions has developed, so have we. All our efforts have led to the creation of WPML, which is now the market-leading multilingual WordPress plugin. Today, WPML is installed on over 1,000,000 WordPress sites and makes it possible to translate your site into 65+ languages.