To localize your website to South Korea, your business should keep in mind the following topics: language, culture, and user behavior. In this guide on how to localize your website for South Korea, we will dive deep into the aforementioned topics using simple and effective examples to make your South Korean business expansion more successful.
Internet User Behaviour in South Korea
Korean citizens are constantly on their phones – either while on the metro, at the gym, or waiting in a queue, they are on their phones. A survey by DigitalPortal shows that the average screen time of a South Korean citizen is 5 hours and 19 minutes. Moreover, more than 99% of the 50 million people in South Korea use their phones to browse the internet, compared to only 45% who use their laptops. This means that your website must be mobile-responsive to incentivize the customers to stay on your page.
How to optimize your website in Korean
Having a website, or at least a landing page, in Korean is a crucial step in order to reduce bounce rates. According to InterAd’s research, having a localized landing page reduces bounce rates by up to 40%.
Why is there such a big difference?
Despite the technological advancement of South Korea, the average person knows English to a less than conversational level, scoring just above the world average. In addition, 79% of people have a preference for their native language. Out of the surveyed people, 40% indicated that they would never purchase a product from a website that does not provide an interface in their native language.
The numbers have most likely made you rethink your marketing strategy for South Korea, however, you should not just rush and create a new landing page using Google Translate. Not only would the translation quality be compromised, but the text layout would suffer.
South Korea uses the alphabet known as Hangul. One character in the Korean alphabet takes up two spaces of the Latin one.
However, you should avoid decreasing the font size as it will harm the readability. Koreans predominantly use their phones, so the letters are already small enough as they are. Regarding the typography, the Korean alphabet (Hangul) does not have a wide variety of free fonts, thus, InterAd recommends that your company sticks to Malgun Gothic or Nanum Gothic
What about the logo? Many brands change their names when they go to China or other APAC countries, so you might be wondering if your brand should also do the same. Concurrently, there is a worldwide minimalism trend, which has made the “wordmark” logo the most popular one.
Even though Koreans do, in fact, prefer their native language over English, your business should not go to such extents as to change its brand image for the new market. You will most likely avoid the loss of customers as the most popular brands in South Korea are already using English.
The image above illustrates the fact that the popular brands in South Korea have not changed their names to Korean but have stuck with the English name.
How to proceed after translating your website to Korean?
Let’s go with a hypothetical scenario:
A Korean person on the metro is going to work. He is scrolling on Naver – the biggest search engine in South Korea – and finds your advertisement on Naver. They have clicked on it and are now on your website. They see that it is in Korean, which makes them earn trust in your brand. They are interested in your product but would first like to do some research about it, as the person has an 85% uncertainty avoidance (according to Hofstede).
In order to mitigate this bottleneck, you can link your social media channels on the Korean landing page. The most trustworthy one is Naver Blog, thus, we suggest that you create a Naver Blog account as soon as possible to start building brand awareness. Read more about social media trends in South Korea
After the person reads about your product on social media, they decide to purchase it. They would now like to purchase it, but they only have the most popular payment methods in South Korea – NaverPay and KakaoPay. Visa and Mastercard are not that popular in South Korea, so you should establish forms of payment that align with the Korean audience.
Here is a summary of the most important points from this customer journey:
- Have a Korean website or at least a Korean landing page.
- Link your social media to your website, preferably a Naver Blog.
- Establish Korean forms of payment.
South Korean cultural nuances.
Honorific speech
The Korean language is very complicated when it comes to speech. Korean has 7 speech levels, though only 4 of them are commonly used in 2025, and only 3 of them are used in a business setting:
- Formal and polite – 하십시오체 (Hasipsio-che)
- Formal and non-polite — 해요체 (Haeyo-che)
- Informal and polite – 해체 (Hae-che)
Depending on the industry of your business, different honorific speech will be used. The most common one is 하십시오체 (Hasipsio-che); however, in some cases, you might have to consider 해체 (Hae-che). For instance, if your target audience is teenagers and you would like to use slang.
A free web translator or AI will not be sufficient as it will not be able to take into account the correct level of speech. Moreover, as Hangul is a relatively new language, there are many “Chinese borrowed words” – about 50% of the South Korean vocabulary. Though in 2025, they are written using Hangul, just 20 years ago they were written with Chinese letters. These words continue to be used with the Chinese characters; however, that only occurs in some specific industries, such as politics, medicine, and academia.
This further indicates that you should outsource a company that specializes in such translation services. For instance, IntearAd – a company with over 25 years of experience.
Korean beauty standards
South Korea is quite the homogenous society; diversity is not very common, thus, your brand models ought to reflect that when penetrating the South Korean market.
Louis Vuitton using an Asian model in South Korea and a white model in the USA is just one of the many examples in which companies completely change their ambassadors when advertising in South Korea. In addition, your business has to also consider factors such as the infamous K-beauty standards – slim models with clear skin and perfect hair. Moreover, depending on the industry and targeted audience, the models should not have any visible tattoos. Even though the younger generation is more accepting of tattoos, they are still deemed as inappropriate, with 79% of the population viewing them in a negative light.
Quick recap. A step-by-step guide on how to localize your website for South Korea
- Make sure your website is responsive for mobile devices.
- Translate your website into Korean.
- Remember that 1 Korean character (Hangul) takes up space for 2 Latin characters. This means that you will have to paraphrase a lot of your sentences to keep the same design. If you do not, the sentence will be displayed rather uncomfortably and uneasily to read.
- Hangul does not have a large variety of free fonts – most of the good ones have to be purchased – so you should stick to the basics – Malgun Gothic and Nanum Gothic.
- Use the correct speech level – either 하십시오체 (Hasipsio-che), 해요체 (Haeyo-che), or 해체 (Hae-che). If you use the wrong one, you might offend your customers and ultimately drive them away.
- Link your social media to your website for more trust. It is strongly advised to create a Naver Blog in order to increase your brand awareness alongside the trustworthiness of your company. You could outsource such a service at InterAd.
- Set up forms of payment that align with South Korea – allow customers to purchase your products/services using KakaoPay and NaverPay. In addition, make sure that the currency displayed on your website is in KRW rather than your country’s currency.
- Be mindful of your brand ambassadors. South Korea has strict beauty standards, so to ensure that your business succeeds, you need the right individuals to represent your brand. Read these two articles to learn how to find and work with South Korean influencers – social media marketing & naver influencer marketing.
After reading this article, you now understand the process of localizing your website to the South Korean market. Interested in localizing services? Make sure to contact InterAd – they respond within one business day!
