How to Add Multiple Languages to Your Shopify Store

Adding a second or third language to your Shopify store is one of the highest-leverage things you can do to grow internationally. Shoppers are far likelier to buy when they can read your store in their own language. The good news: Shopify supports multiple languages natively. The catch: it does not translate the content for you, and its free tooling stops at two languages. This guide walks through how to add multiple languages to your Shopify store, where the native tools run out, and how to automate the whole thing.

Can you have multiple languages on Shopify?

Yes. Every Shopify store can publish more than one language on its storefront. Shopify supports 20+ languages natively, handling the parts that are hard to get right on your own: language-specific URLs, a language selector in your theme, and the hreflang tags search engines use to serve the correct language.

What Shopify does not do is write the translations. Out of the box, your added languages start empty. You fill them in one of two ways: manually, with Shopify’s free Translate & Adapt app, or automatically, with a translation app such as LocaleFlow. Think of Shopify as the framework that decides where each language lives, and the translation layer as the thing that decides what each language says.

How to add multiple languages to your Shopify store

Here is the native path, using tools built into Shopify. You can complete these steps in a few minutes; the translation work is what takes longer.

Step 1: Add a language in Settings

1. In your Shopify admin, go to Settings > Languages.
2. Click Add language.
3. Choose the language you want to sell in and click Add.

At this point the language exists but is unpublished, so customers cannot see it yet. It is a container waiting for translated content.

Step 2: Translate the content

An empty language helps no one. You need translated text for products, collections, pages, and navigation before you publish. Shopify’s free Translate & Adapt app is the native way to do this:

1. Install Translate & Adapt from the Shopify App Store.
2. Open it and pick the language you added.
3. Work through each content type, entering translations field by field.

The free tier covers up to 2 additional languages and every translation is entered by hand. That is fine for a small catalog in one extra language; it becomes a serious time sink as products and languages multiply.

Step 3: Publish the language

Once a language has enough translated content to feel complete:

1. Return to Settings > Languages.
2. Find the language under Unpublished languages.
3. Click Publish.

Published languages become selectable on your live storefront.

Step 4: Add a language selector to your theme

Customers need a way to switch languages. Most modern Shopify themes include a built-in selector:

1. Go to Online Store > Themes > Customize.
2. Open the header or footer section.
3. Enable the Language selector block.

If your theme lacks one, add a language selector block through the theme editor or your theme’s settings.

Publish Only When It's Ready

A half-translated language looks worse than no translation at all. Flowy’s rule: fill a language with content first, preview it end to end, then publish. Shoppers notice the one page that’s still in English.

How many languages can a Shopify store have?

Shopify supports 20+ languages natively, but how many you can practically run depends on how you translate them. Here is the quick version:

The ceiling is rarely Shopify itself. The ceiling is the labor of translating and maintaining each language by hand. That is exactly where a translation app changes the math.

Native translation vs a translation app

Adding the language is easy. Keeping several languages accurate and current is the hard part. This is where the native tools and a dedicated app diverge.

The decisive difference is auto-sync. With manual translation, every new product and every price or description edit leaves a gap in each language until you go back and fix it. A store with three languages and a steady stream of new products can quietly drift out of sync in weeks.

Which languages should you add first?

Do not add ten languages at once. Start with the markets where you already see demand, then expand. A practical way to prioritize:

• Check your analytics. In Shopify admin, look at sessions by country and language. Traffic already arriving from a country is the strongest signal that a translated storefront will convert.
• Follow your shipping zones. If you already ship to Germany and France, those languages pay off fastest.
• Look at abandoned checkouts by region. High traffic but low conversion from a non-English country often means the language barrier is costing you sales.

For most stores, one or two well-translated languages outperform five half-finished ones. Add a language, translate it fully, publish it, measure the lift, then move to the next. This keeps quality high and lets you tie each new language to real revenue rather than guesswork.

How to add multiple languages automatically with LocaleFlow

If you are adding more than two languages, or you add products regularly, automating translation is worth it. The flow looks like this:

1. Install LocaleFlow from the Shopify App Store.
2. Add your target languages under Settings > Languages (LocaleFlow reads them from Shopify).
3. In LocaleFlow, select which languages and content types to translate.
4. Run the initial translation. LocaleFlow processes your whole catalog with AI.
5. Turn on auto-sync so new and edited content is translated automatically going forward.

You still publish languages in Shopify and keep full control, but you are no longer typing translations by hand. For a deeper walkthrough of pairing this with Shopify’s international routing, see our guide to setting up Shopify Markets with automatic translations.

Set It and Forget It

Once auto-sync is on, adding a new product translates it into every language on its own. Flowy handles the busywork so you can focus on selling, not on copy-pasting translations.

What to translate beyond product descriptions

A common mistake is translating only product titles and descriptions, then wondering why the storefront still feels half-English. To read as truly native, a multi-language store needs:

• Navigation menus so shoppers can browse in their language
• Collections and pages including your About and shipping pages
• Blog posts if content marketing is part of your strategy
• Metafields and metaobjects that power custom content and product specs
• Product option names and values like “Color” and “Red”
• Image alt text for accessibility and image search

Metafields in particular are easy to forget and often carry important product detail. See our dedicated guide on how to translate Shopify metafields for the specifics.

Multi-language SEO: hreflang and URLs

Adding languages is only half the win; search engines have to understand them. Shopify handles the mechanics automatically when you publish a language:

• Language-specific URLs (for example, /fr/products/...) so each language is a distinct, indexable page
• hreflang tags that tell Google which language and region each URL targets

You do not have to code these yourself, but you should verify them. Google’s own guidance on localized versions of a page explains how hreflang prevents the wrong language from showing in results. For the full picture of ranking a multilingual store, read our guide to multilingual SEO for Shopify.

Common mistakes to avoid

A few pitfalls trip up most first-time multi-language stores:

• Publishing a language before it is fully translated, leaving English fragments in checkout or menus
• Machine-translating brand names and product codes that should stay unchanged
• Ignoring auto-sync, so new products sit untranslated for weeks
• Forgetting metafields and option values, which breaks the illusion of a native store

We cover these and more in the most common Shopify translation mistakes.

Conclusion

Adding multiple languages to your Shopify store comes down to three moves: add and publish the languages in Settings, translate the content, and expose a language selector in your theme. Shopify’s free Translate & Adapt gets you two languages of manual translation. Beyond that, or once you are adding products regularly, a translation app removes the ongoing work by translating automatically and re-syncing as your store changes.

Ready to run several languages without the manual grind? Start translating with LocaleFlow and add every language your customers speak.

Related guides

• How to set up Shopify Markets with automatic translations
• The complete multilingual SEO guide for Shopify
• How to translate Shopify metafields