For some reason or another, you’re yet to transform your website into one that is multilingual and accessible in many countries around the world. Whether it be the fear of offending a culture you’re unfamiliar with, or just simply feeling technophobic when it comes to the latest website tools, keeping your website strictly monolingual could be the very thing that’s holding you back.
Here at Pixel Executive, we firmly believe that embracing a multilingual website opens up unlimited doors for your business, such as a vast new target audience to engage with, and a potential for higher profits. But do the facts stack up? We’ve compiled a list of facts and statistics that could convince you to finally take a chance on making your website multilingual.
1. Despite common assumptions that English is the dominant language spoken around the world, it actually comes third in the list of the top ten languages spoken around the world. Whereas there are an estimated 379 million English speakers around the globe, Chinese is by far the most-spoken language, with 918 million speakers. Between the two languages sits Spanish, with 480 million speakers. This just goes to show how much translating your website could do for appealing to potential new customers overseas.
2. If your website is formatted to have just 2 or 3 languages (or more!), it instantly becomes accessible to more than 33% of the world’s internet-using population. Though there are estimated to be more than 6.5k languages around the world, having your website accessible to at least two of the following languages means that three-quarters of internet users around the world can access your site: English, Chinese, German, Spanish, French, Arabic, Portuguese, Russian, Japanese, and Indonesian.
3. It is estimated that a whopping 72.4% of international internet browsers prefer to shop on websites that cater to their native tongue. After all, online shopping should be a pleasurable experience – why would you opt for a website that you have to translate? And if you can’t understand the language at all, you risk buying products without understanding all of the relevant information, such as product dimensions and shipping costs.
If these facts have shown you the need to transform your website into one that is multilingual, but you don’t know where to start, then get in touch with Pixel Executive today.