I have made a big mistake when creating my first Shopify store kumlai.com when I set the default language to French as it is my native language, with originally the French language on the .com
When I realized my mistake, the website was already finished and translated in English for various other markets.
So after researching a lot, I still have French as the default language, but in a .com/fr-fr folder and English on the .com and I thought that would solve my issue. But it doesn’t.
For example, when searching for the website in France, it pops up in English.
Do any of you have insight on this subject, and would you advise me to change the default language to English? Could it solve it? If yes, there are a number of caveats to this, did anyone do it and has their list of issues they encountered? I made a number of customization and am worried they will all be erased.
This isn’t caused by the default language setting itself. Google determines which language to show mainly through hreflang tags, canonical URLs, and indexing signals, not Shopify’s default language.
Changing the default language now is not recommended and usually does not fix this issue. It can also introduce theme or translation conflicts.
In most cases, the solution is to:
Verify that hreflang tags are correctly implemented between / (EN) and /fr-fr (FR)
Ensure French pages are fully localized and indexed in Google Search Console
Confirm canonicals and internal links point to the correct language versions
If you’d like a more precise diagnosis, you can share your store URL and grant collaborator access so the hreflang, canonicals, and indexing setup can be reviewed in detail.
Do not change your default language to English. Since your admin content is written in French, switching the setting will merely tag your current French text as “English” and likely delete your existing translation files.
The reason French users are landing on the English version is likely due to redirection settings. Google prioritizes your root domain (.com) over subfolders if it is not strictly told otherwise.
To fix this, go to Settings > Markets > Preferences and enable Domain redirection. This forces Shopify to automatically detect a visitor’s location and bounce French IP addresses to the correct /fr-fr folder.