T
wenty years ago, Yahoo! was the world’s leading internet search engine and one of the most-visited websites globally. It had launched its first localized website, for Japan, in 1996 and had expanded to an impressive 13 languages.
But there was an upstart search engine on the rise, taking global expansion to an entirely new level. By the end of 2004, this search engine supported 67 languages and had quickly surpassed Yahoo! in market share. That search engine was Google, a company that pioneered a number of web globalization best practices that are still with us today.
For the past 20 years, I have benchmarked the websites of the leading global brands in the annual Web Globalization Report Card. These reports have identified new and established best practices, as well as emerging trends. When I look back over the past two decades, a few best practices resonate as strongly now as they did then. This article highlights these time-tested strategies and techniques for effective global websites.
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Back then, there were only 750 million internet users on the planet, the majority of whom were native English speakers. A company could launch an English-language website and be confident that most internet users could understand it. But the internet was growing exponentially, as well as multilingually. Companies with global aspirations knew that adapting to a multilingual internet would be essential to their long-term success.
However, the infrastructure supporting global websites was still in its infancy. At the time, websites typically varied encodings based on the languages they supported. Remember ISO-8859-1? But the evolution of Unicode (UTF-8) offered a character encoding that supported the world’s major scripts and languages, allowing for more scalable web and software development. Google benefited greatly from Unicode, as did subsequent companies such as Facebook.
A popular web globalization strategy today may be viewed as a fad tomorrow. It is only after tracking websites across many years that you understand which design and architectural elements are worth keeping and which should be left behind. The following five best practices have endured for decades and continue to be guidelines to follow today.
Automakers have long understood the value of a global template. Toyota, for example, created the Toyota New Global Architecture, shown in Figure 1, which is effectively an automotive platform that can be shared across more than two dozen makes and models of automobiles.
A similar concept applies to global and local websites. Global design templates allow companies to leverage a common look, feel, and architecture across all of its countries, regions, and languages — saving enormous resources along the way. This scalability was a major reason why Google, from day one, relied on global templates.
Global templates enable significant internal efficiencies, as country teams no longer have to worry about website architecture and can focus on locally relevant promotions and content. And, should there be a promotion that needs to be deployed across dozens of country websites, knowing that there are consistent dimensions across these sites gives global teams the ability to quickly go to market with new products and services.
In addition, global templates provide a better user experience to your website visitors and customers. People often navigate across websites — beginning at the global “.com” homepage before navigating to the country-specific site. Displaying a consistent look and feel across sites ultimately improves brand awareness. For example, the company logo should remain consistently positioned on all sites, with a possible exception for right-to-left layouts for markets with bidirectional scripts (such as Arabic and Hebrew).
While some designers view global templates as overly restrictive, this is only true if they are implemented heavy-handedly. A successful global template balances global consistency with local flexibility.
From 20 years ago until today, Philips and Amazon have relied on global templates, as seen in Figure 2. Doing so has allowed both companies to focus on local content and functionality rather than web designs for each new market.
Contrast Philips and Amazon with Honda, which, in 2003, relied on a mix of locally distinct designs (see Figure 3, on the next page). Today, Honda has made notable progress in consolidating designs, particularly across Europe, but is still lacking a truly global template.
The lesson here is that the sooner you can adopt global templates, the better off you will be in the long run. It is not easy to convince local offices to embrace consistency once they’ve grown accustomed to doing things their own way.
Many websites use flags as visual elements to allow users to change the country, region, or language. I have long advocated against this. The biggest reason to leave out flags is to avoid any potential geopolitical issues.
Moreover, many flags share common colors and shapes, which could make it difficult for users to quickly find their flag. A global gateway with 50 or more flags is not going to be any more visually usable than one with plain-text links to the countries or regions.
Flags are also sometimes used, incorrectly, to indicate language. In Figure 4, Spain’s flag is used to denote Spanish, but this actually narrows the reach of the localized site.
Figure 5(a) shows the global gateway that Apple used for many years. Fortunately, Apple dropped the flags in 2021, as shown in Figure 5(b). Apple was not alone. Over the past five years, a number of major websites have dropped flags, including Hotels.com, Tesla, and Spotify.
Country codes are top-level domains that indicate a country or region, such as “.fr” for “France.” There are more than 250 country codes in use around the world. Of the websites studied in the Web Globalization Report Card, more than 70% now use country codes for at least some of their localized websites.
Customers in certain countries — such as Canada, Germany, and Japan — greatly value country codes to signify a localized website. Country codes can also play a positive role in search engine results, which is never a bad thing.
In 2003, Amazon wisely appended country codes to its logo to extend the brand and educate customers that a localized version of the website was available. Today, Amazon continues to support country codes in this fashion, as seen in Figure 6.
Twenty years ago, most people accessed the internet via dial-up connection. For those of us who remember those days, dial-up left us staring at our screens, waiting for websites to display.
But just because much of the world now has broadband internet and 5G cellular connections doesn’t mean that website performance is no longer an issue. Globally, many people rely on mobile networks that can vary widely in bandwidth — even in more developed markets.
While companies can use caching and edge networks to improve website speeds, the most important factor is the size of the website itself. As a general rule, designers should aim for 3 megabytes or less to ensure that their website performs as well or better than the competition.
Enabling multiple languages is no longer a “nice to have” element of a successful website, but a feature itself, every bit as important as the products or services a company offers. If there is one constant over the past two decades, it is the growth of languages across websites. The leading global brands now offer an average of 34 languages, as shown in Figure 7. Wikipedia supports 339 languages — representing a benchmark of sorts for linguistic demand around the world.
Automatic translation functionality is another exciting trend, with companies like Airbnb enabling customer-facing automatic translation (see Figure 8). More companies are sure to follow suit.
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What will the next 20 years bring to web globalization? The need for more languages is clear. Automatic or on-demand translation will vastly expand the breadth of languages available to users, provided companies manage user expectations successfully. Translation engines such as Google Translate will continue to unlock vast quantities of content for the world’s internet users. And as more companies support more languages, many of the timeless best practices mentioned in this article will become even more important. So keep history in mind as you move forward, learning from the mistakes as well as the successes of others.
John Yunker is co-founder of Byte Level Research and has consulted with many of the world’s largest multinational corporations, providing web globalization training and benchmark services. He has authored 20 annual editions of The Web Globalization Report Card.
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