How to Translate Shopify Pages (About, FAQ, Shipping & More)

Disclosure: This article is published by the StoreLingo team. StoreLingo is a Shopify app for multilingual stores. The advice below is intended to be useful regardless of which tool you use.

Most merchants spend hours perfecting their product descriptions, then ship an untranslated "About Us" page to every international customer they worked hard to reach. That single oversight signals "this store wasn't built for you"—and it costs conversions.

This guide explains exactly how to translate Shopify pages—About, FAQ, Shipping Policy, Returns, and others—using Shopify's native translation infrastructure, with practical advice on what to prioritize, how to keep translations current, and how to avoid the SEO mistakes that most multilingual stores make.

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Why Translating Shopify Pages Directly Affects Conversions and Trust

Product pages get most of the translation attention, and for good reason. But standalone pages carry disproportionate weight in the purchase decision:

• About Us establishes brand legitimacy for customers who've never heard of you.
• FAQ answers pre-purchase objections. An untranslated FAQ means those objections go unanswered—in the customer's language—at the exact moment they're deciding whether to buy.
• Shipping & Delivery pages reduce cart abandonment. Customers want to know delivery times and costs before they add to cart.
• Returns & Refunds pages build the confidence needed for a first purchase, especially in markets where consumer protection expectations are high (Germany, France, the Nordics).

If you're already translating products and collections, pages are the natural next step. For a broader view of everything that needs translating, the Complete Shopify Translation Checklist for Going Multilingual is a useful companion.

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How Shopify Page Translation Actually Works

Shopify stores translations in its Translations API, which means every translated string sits alongside the original in your store's database—there's no duplicate theme, no language-specific pages, no manual URL management needed.

When a customer visits your store in French, Shopify serves the French translation of each page automatically, provided you've:

1. Added a language in Settings → Languages (click "Add language" and search for the language you want)
2. Published that language so it becomes accessible on your storefront
3. Added translations for the page content itself

A note on Shopify Markets: If you're using Shopify Markets to target specific regions, languages are managed per-market inside Settings → Markets → [Market name] → Languages. In some configurations, adding a language there also adds it globally under Settings → Languages. The exact flow depends on your Shopify plan and whether you've enabled Markets. Either way, translation content still lives in the Translations API and is edited the same way—the entry point is just different.

Once a language is live, you can add translations manually via Shopify's Translate & Adapt app (free, first-party), via a third-party app, or via the Translations API directly if you're comfortable with code.

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Translate Shopify Pages: A Practical Step-by-Step Approach

Step 1: Identify Which Pages You Have

Go to Online Store → Pages in your Shopify admin. Make a list. A typical store has:

• About Us / Our Story
• FAQ
• Shipping & Delivery
• Returns & Refund Policy
• Privacy Policy / Terms of Service
• Contact

Don't forget pages buried in your navigation footer. Those are often the most trust-critical and the most neglected.

Step 2: Prioritize by Conversion Impact

Rather than translating everything at once, rank pages by how directly they influence purchase decisions. This is opinionated guidance, not a universal rule—your store's analytics should inform your own order:

Translate first:

• FAQ (removes pre-purchase objections)
• Shipping & Delivery (reduces cart abandonment)
• Returns & Refunds (builds first-purchase confidence)

Translate second:

• About Us (builds brand trust over time)
• Contact (essential for post-purchase support queries)

Translate when you have capacity:

• Privacy Policy / Terms of Service (legally important but rarely read before purchase)

Step 3: Translate the Content and the SEO Meta Fields

This is where many merchants stop short. Shopify pages have three translatable text areas:

1. Page title — appears in the browser tab and in search results
2. Page body (HTML) — the visible content
3. SEO title and meta description — the fields under "Search engine listing preview" in the page editor

Translating the body but leaving the SEO title in English means your French page will rank (or not rank) with an English meta title in Google.fr. Translate all three.

On URL handles: Shopify's Translate & Adapt app does not currently allow you to translate the URL slug (e.g., changing /pages/shipping to /pages/livraison). The handle stays in the source language. If localized slugs matter for your SEO strategy, this is a known platform limitation. For more on how Shopify handles multilingual SEO, see Shopify Multilingual SEO: How to Rank in Every Language.

Step 4: Review Before Publishing

Machine translation has improved dramatically, but pages like FAQ and Returns use very specific legal and procedural language where a wrong word changes meaning. Build a review step into your workflow:

• Use an app that lets you see source and translation side-by-side before going live
• Pay particular attention to numbered steps, conditional statements ("if your order hasn't shipped"), and any references to your return window or policy terms
• For a discussion of when AI translation is sufficient and when human review adds value, see AI Translation vs Human Translation for E-commerce: What Actually Works

Step 5: Keep Translations in Sync When Pages Change

This is the workflow failure mode most merchants don't anticipate. You update your Shipping page to reflect a new carrier. The English version is current. The French, German, and Spanish versions are now wrong.

A concrete trigger to use: when you edit a page's body and the word count changes by more than roughly 10%, treat that as a retranslation signal. Some translation apps can detect content changes automatically and flag stale translations. If you're managing this manually, create a Shopify webhook on pages/update events that posts to a Slack channel or a simple spreadsheet log—this way, every page edit creates a visible record that prompts a translation check.

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Don't Forget Pages Inside Your Policies Settings

Shopify has a separate section for legal pages: Settings → Policies. This includes:

• Refund policy
• Privacy policy
• Terms of service
• Shipping policy

These are editable separately from Online Store → Pages, and they're easy to overlook in a translation workflow. They need the same treatment: body content plus SEO meta fields.

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One Thing That Connects All of This

If your store has more than a handful of pages and you're targeting more than one or two languages, managing translations one field at a time gets tedious quickly. StoreLingo translates all page content—including SEO meta fields—across all your target languages at once, flags content that's changed since the last translation, and lets you review before publishing. It uses Shopify's native translation layer, so no theme edits are needed.

Add StoreLingo on the Shopify App Store →

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Pages in Context: The Bigger Multilingual Picture

Translating pages is one piece of a larger project. Once your pages are done, the natural next steps are:

• Collections — category pages that also carry SEO weight: How to Translate Shopify Collections (and Why It Matters for SEO)
• Blog posts — if you publish content for international audiences: How to Translate Shopify Blog Posts for International Readers
• Language switcher — customers need a way to select their language: How to Add a Language Switcher to Your Shopify Store

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FAQ

Do I need to translate Shopify policy pages separately from regular pages? Yes. Policy pages (Refund Policy, Privacy Policy, Terms of Service, Shipping Policy) live under Settings → Policies in your Shopify admin, not under Online Store → Pages. They require translation separately and are easy to miss in a multilingual setup.

Can I translate Shopify page URL slugs into other languages? Not through Shopify's native tools currently. The URL handle (e.g., /pages/shipping) stays in the source language regardless of which translation is displayed. Shopify serves the correct translated content at that URL based on the customer's selected language, but the slug itself does not change per language.

What happens if I update a page after it's already been translated? The existing translations remain live but become stale—they'll show the old content until you retranslate. This is the most common multilingual maintenance failure. Set up a pages/update webhook or use a translation app with change-detection to catch updates before outdated content reaches international customers.