How to translate your website.
There are four ways to do it and they cost wildly different amounts. Two of the four aren't us, and this page says which.
The short answer
One market, under ten pages, rarely changes? Translate it once by hand and forget about it. Site changes weekly, or you're entering a market you plan to stay in? You want translations that maintain themselves, which is what this category of software does. Words with legal or medical risk? Hire a certified translator and keep a model away from them.
The four ways, and what each really costs.
| Approach | What it costs | Fits when |
|---|---|---|
| A professional translator, once | Per word, and again every time the page changes | A small site that does not change, or copy where a mistake is expensive |
| A browser plugin or auto-translate widget | Little or nothing | You want readers, not rankings — Google indexes one language |
| Translation software (this category) | A monthly fee, usually by volume or by seat | The site changes and you want it to stay translated without anyone remembering to |
| Your developers, by hand, in the codebase | Engineering time, forever | You already have an i18n setup and only need the words |
Readable and findable are different purchases.
Most people asking how to translate their website mean two things at once: that a visitor from Germany can read it, and that a customer in Germany can find it. Those need different machinery, and the cheap options only do the first.
-
01
Being readable is easy
Plugins, widgets and script-based tools all swap the words in the browser. The visitor is already on your page, so that's the whole job.
-
02
Being findable needs a URL
For Google to rank your German page, that page needs its own address a crawler can fetch. One URL that changes language in the browser is one page, in one language, as far as Google is concerned.
-
03
So ask which one you are buying
It's a fair question to put to any vendor, us included: does this give me a separate, crawlable page per language on my kind of site? Ask it before you pay. The answer changes depending on how your site is built.
Where we fit, and where we do not.
If your site has a build
Astro, Rails, Next.js, Vue, or anything with a deploy step: we write real translated files into it. Real pages, real URLs, and nothing depending on us once they're built.
If your site is on a hosted builder
One script tag translates it for your visitors. There's no page per language, so your site becomes readable but not findable. That's a real limit and it's why this page exists.
If the words carry risk
Contracts, medical copy, anything with liability attached: use a certified translator. Skiwo runs a translation service, and that's what we'd point you at for those words.
Start with one language and see.
Free to start, no card. If one of the other three answers was the right one, you'll know by this afternoon.
Starta gratis