3 Steps to Successfully Maintain Your Global Websites

As many global companies know, localization is not a “one and done” project after you’ve finished launching your multilingual presence. While processes like localization automation can help you easily scale your localization efforts, you should make sure to include ongoing maintenance to ensure the quality and relevance of your translated content.

To successfully maintain all your global websites, here are some simple steps to ensure the continued success of your localized websites and apps.

1. Keep track of international traffic and results.

Understanding the traffic of each of your localized sites will help you understand whether you are achieving the international market coverage you projected. To effectively track traffic, you’ll require a more nuanced analysis that breaks down whether the content you’ve translated is a good fit for the market you are speaking to.

For example, are there pages on one of your sites that are never visited? You may want to minimize the time and resource investment that goes into updating the content to these lower traffic pages.

As a general rule of thumb, measure performance against your original expectations and use the learnings gained for developing projections and from real-time insight gathered from data pipelines for future international markets you are considering for expansion.

2. Address content updates, in a timely manner.

Any new or updated content on your main site that will be included in your localized sites should be translated and published regularly to ensure customers or prospects in all your markets have access to your most up-to-date information. Luckily, because you’ve already created a robust process, these updates should be relatively painless to make. And if you’ve chosen to use a localization automation platform, your new content has been automatically recognized; just select it for translation, and the process will begin with easy tracking of your progress.

3. Build and maintain your translation database.

From the first moment you start localizing your content, you have begun to create a valuable database of translation information that is fitted perfectly to your brand’s international expansion needs. This means that every translation and localization project you complete actually gives you an arsenal of translation data that will help you guide your future translation efforts – making sure that both the tone and quality of continuous future translations are best aligned with your brand.

Some translation management tools, like Transifex, actually give you a feature that enables you to effectively keep track of and maintain your translation database. With features like Translation Memory, you can capture all approved translations in one central location – from sentences to paragraphs and sentence-like snippets. With this database built, translators can access prior translations and work at more faster pace, delivering more quality translations in a given time period. Beyond the economic benefits, maintaining a translation database like Translation Memory will provide improved consistency across your translations, even across multiple translation resources. And as your Translation Memory grows over time, it makes your on-going translation efforts more efficient. This means that your upfront investment in tailoring your brand voice to each market where you play is protected and reinforced, rather than gradually eroded over time as resources come and go. Think of this process as your brand IP – a digital record of your brand development work.

With the right tools and approach, any company can implement a multilingual strategy to build a quality set of international websites that supports its business goals. Whether you are just launching your translation efforts or maintaining your global websites, you’ll ensure localization success as long as you do your homework at each step of the process, set reasonable expectations and measure against them, and use all of your translation information and data to make choices that are the best fit for your business’ specific resources and international goals.

Explore the Full #TranslationMustKnows Series

This post is part of the #translationmustknows series, built to equip everyone in your localization process – from developers to localization managers – with the knowledge and resources necessary for achieving translation and localization success.

Explore the full #translationmustknows series to catch up on other posts and learn everything you need to know for translation success:

• 6 Things to Keep In Mind When Selecting Content to Localize
• 2 Simple Ways to Calculate Your Translation Budget
• How to Easily Automate Your Localization Efforts
• 3 Steps to Successfully Maintain Your Global Websites
• 3 Ways to Build an International URL Structure
• 5 Resources for Translating & Localizing Your Content

Achieve Website Translation Success

Website localization is a complex task. That’s why we’ve put together a guide that breaks down each key step of your software localization process from start to finish. Download the guide for action items and best practices for website and app localization, and an overview of the results that effective localization can drive for your business. Whether you’re a digital marketer responsible for all the facets of your company’s website or a webmaster responsible for the infrastructure and processes behind the scenes, this guide will walk you through all the critical steps of localizing your content.