Weglot is the industry standard for detecting and serving translations, but its “auto-translate” feature is a generic baseline: the most effective way to scale a high-quality multilingual site is to use Weglot for the delivery and AI Glot for the bulk, glossary-controlled refinement of your CSV exports.
Understanding why website translation is important for your business is the first step. Choosing the best website translation software for your stack is the next.
Weglot detects and serves your translations automatically, but its own auto-translate feature is a generic first pass. Running that export through AI Glot’s bulk, glossary-controlled workflow is what gets the wording closer to how your brand actually talks.
How Weglot’s translation engine works
Weglot combines machine translation from Google, DeepL, and Microsoft Translator with a Visual Editor for manual fixes. Key features:
- Platform integration: Works with WordPress, Shopify, and custom CMS setups through JavaScript injection.
- Dynamic content support: CSS selector mapping lets it catch AJAX-loaded or JavaScript-rendered strings, not just static HTML.
- SEO handling: It translates metadata, URLs, and image alt text alongside the visible text. See our SEO website translation guide and the benefits of multilingual SEO for what to check once that is live.
Getting started: A step-by-step guide with Weglot
1. Install and Configure Weglot
- Start by installing the Weglot plugin or module via your CMS’s marketplace.
- Activate the plugin using your API key and choose your target languages.
- Weglot auto-detects all textual content, from blog posts to widget labels, setting you up for immediate translation.
2. Use the machine translation as a starting point
- Weglot returns translations instantly from Google, DeepL, and Microsoft Translator.
- Use Weglot’s Visual Editor and Translation List interface to fix specific strings by hand.
- For pages like product descriptions or legal disclaimers, flag strings for professional review instead of publishing the raw machine output.
3. Optimize for Multilingual SEO
- Weglot automatically restructures your website’s URL architecture to include language-specific subdirectories (e.g., example.com/de/).
- It generates hreflang tags and XML sitemaps that help search engines serve the best page to your users based on their language and region.
- By localizing SEO components like meta descriptions and Open Graph tags, you directly boost your site’s global visibility.
Machine translation is a reasonable baseline, but getting closer to your actual brand voice needs a tool that works on the export itself rather than the live page. That’s what AI Glot does. We have a step-by-step guide on how to translate CSV files with AI if you’re ready to start.
Translate into German and Spanish. Keep product names in English, use our glossary, and make the copy sound natural for e-commerce.
Where AI Glot fits around a site Weglot already serves:
AI Glot never touches your site. It works on the export and hands the file back, which is what makes it safe to run against a site that is already live.
- Refine the automatic pass in one batch, not string by string. Export your translation list from Weglot, run it through AI Glot, re-import it. Your subdirectories, your hreflang tags and your language switcher stay exactly where Weglot put them, because nothing in that layer is part of the file.
- Aim the second pass at the strings that still need it. The instruction can be as narrow as “only the rows where the German column is still empty” or “only the rows where the German text is identical to the English.” An update then costs you the strings you actually care about instead of the whole site again.
- Settle the wording once, for every future export. A glossary lives in your workspace rather than in a single job, so the term you agreed on in March is applied to the export you run in September. It is applied as meaning while each string is written, not substituted wherever the word appears, so the sentence around it still reads properly.
- Spend differently on different content. Standard costs about one credit per word. Lite fits roughly three times more words into the same credits, which is the honest choice for a six year blog archive and the wrong one for your pricing page.
Ongoing maintenance
Translation is not a one-off task. As your content changes, re-export and re-process the new or changed rows rather than the whole site. Do local keyword research per language so translated pages rank on the terms people actually search, and check your multilingual analytics periodically for duplicate content or a language version that is falling behind.
Conclusion
Weglot handles detection and delivery well. AI Glot’s job is the batch refinement underneath it: consistent terminology, a glossary that holds across every future export, and cost that scales with word count instead of headcount. Used together, they cover both the plumbing and the wording.
Sign up to AI Glot to run your first Weglot export through it.