View your website from another country

If you work with more than one country, language or currency, the question "what does someone in Germany actually see on my site?" is harder than it looks. From your own chair you always get your own version. This page explains how country-based delivery works, what tends to go wrong, and how to check it yourself with the tool above.

Why your site can look different in another country

Four mechanisms decide what a visitor gets.

Redirecting on IP country. The server or a script looks at the country of the IP address and sends the visitor to a country version, for example from / to /de/. That often works for people and fails for search engines: a crawler that follows the redirect never reaches the other versions.

Redirecting on language preference. The browser sends a language preference (Accept-Language) and some sites pick the version from that. This is cleaner than redirecting on IP, because it is about the visitor's preference rather than their location.

Currency and shipping information. Shops switch prices, currency, tax and shipping per country. Sometimes server-side, sometimes only in the browser with a script — and that last one is a well-known source of surprises.

Content delivery and caching. A CDN stores a version of your page per region. With the wrong cache settings a visitor in Spain can get an old or even the wrong language version.

What the tool above measures

The check requests your page with the language preference that belongs to the chosen country and follows the redirects. You then see:

• whether you get redirected, and where to;
• which language the page declares (lang in the HTML);
• which currencies appear in the page;
• which language versions you declared with hreflang, and which one fits the chosen country;
• the title and description that are served.

Switch on the real view and we also fetch a screenshot from a network in that country. That part uses an external service; if it is not switched on you get a note and the rest of the check keeps working.

Worth knowing: this is not a VPN. A VPN moves your whole connection; the check above only moves the request that reaches your server. For language, redirects, hreflang and currency that is exactly enough. If you want to click through the site as if you lived there, a real VPN or a browser with a proxy in that country remains the right tool.

Hreflang: the core of multilingual findability

Hreflang tells search engines which language versions of a page exist and who they are for. Three rules that trip people up:

1. Every version links to all versions, including itself. If your German page does not link back to the Dutch one, search engines ignore the pairing.
2. Use full, absolute URLs in the canonical form, so with or without www exactly as the page is really reachable.
3. Add an x-default for visitors who fit none of your versions.

Combining hreflang with IP-based redirects is the classic mistake: you declare four language versions neatly, and then push everyone into one of them. Your hreflang works on paper and not in practice.

Tip: how to handle it

Pick one version visitors get by default, let them switch with a clear country or language selector, and never hard-redirect on IP address. Someone in Germany requesting the Dutch page sometimes really wants it — offering a choice at the right moment beats a forced detour. Search engines can then see all your versions and your visitor stays in control.

What else to check per country

• Speed. A site that is fast in Europe can be slow on the other side of the world. Measure it with a PageSpeed test and see whether you need a CDN.
• Advertising. Targeting campaigns by country also means landing pages in the right language and currency. See advertising on Google.
• Technology and findability. For the broad check, use our website scan.
• Seeing it with your own eyes. To click through the site as if you lived there, read how to use a VPN to test your website per country and where it falls short.

Common mistakes

Automatic redirects with no way out. Without a visible country selector a visitor is stuck in the wrong version.

Treating language as country. Someone in Belgium may want Dutch or French; someone in Switzerland German, French or Italian. Country is not language.

Only fixing the homepage. Deep pages are exactly where people land from search results. Check what is served there too.

Converting prices only in the browser. For a moment the wrong amount is on screen, and that is the amount people remember.