The Korean is done. A native speaker went through it, the terms are right, the register holds. You put it live, and it still doesn’t read like a Korean company’s page.
That reaction is worth taking seriously, because visitors rarely explain it. Nobody thinks “this footer is missing the block of business details I’m used to.” They think the page is a little off, and they leave.
The cause is mechanical. Translation swaps the words. It leaves in place everything else the page uses to say this is a real business you can buy from — and all of that was decided by the market the page was originally drawn for.
Density is set by your industry, not by the country
The first question people ask is how dense Korean pages run, and it’s the wrong axis. There is no single answer, because density in Korea is decided by what you sell, not by where you’re selling.
A Korean marketplace, portal or spec-heavy retail page carries far more in view than its Western counterpart — more navigation exposed rather than tucked behind a menu, more specification readable without a click. A Korean premium brand or fintech page is as spare as anything in Europe. Both are Korean conventions. The same split runs through Japan and China, which is why “add density, it’s East Asia” is wrong about as often as it’s right.
So the useful comparison isn’t your page against Korean pages in general. It’s your page against Korean pages in your own category, because that’s the only group your buyer is comparing you to. The mistake that actually travels is quieter: your layout carries your home market’s norm for your industry, and in Korea that industry may sit somewhere else entirely.
The block at the bottom of the page
Open a Korean site you’d actually buy from and scroll all the way down. Under the footer links there’s a block of business identity: the company name, the name of the representative, a business registration number, a mail-order registration number, an address, and a route to customer service.
It’s there because of how selling online is registered in Korea, and it reads as a standard part of the page rather than a design flourish. I can’t tell you what a visitor concludes when it’s missing — nobody can measure that from outside. What I can tell you is structural: a page that ends in a single line of copyright ends in a different place than the pages it’s being compared against.
Whether your business has to carry that block depends on how you’re selling into Korea, and that’s a question for whoever handles your Korean entity rather than a design decision. But the layout question arrives either way, because the footer has to have somewhere to put it.
Where the contact route is expected to go
Look at how the Korean sites in your category ask to be contacted. On a lot of them the primary route is a messenger channel rather than a form — the button opens a chat, and someone answers in the thread. Check it rather than take my word for it: it varies by industry the same way density does, and it’s the fastest of these three to compare.
A form that collects a name, a company and a message, then promises a reply within two business days, is a normal thing to put on a page in most markets. Here it asks for something different from what the pages beside you are asking for: a written enquiry and a wait, rather than a message in a thread. Whether that costs you enquiries is not something I can measure for you — but it is a difference you should have chosen rather than inherited.
Finding out where your own page sits
You don’t need to develop taste in a market you haven’t sold in yet. You only need to know whether your page is standing somewhere unusual, and that’s a comparison you can run yourself.
Open your Korean page next to two or three Korean sites in your own category — competitors if you have them, otherwise companies selling something comparable at a comparable price. Then answer three questions about your page rather than theirs:
- Before the first click, how much can a visitor see? Navigation, price or specification, proof. If your page shows noticeably less or more than the others, that’s the density gap, and it came from your home market.
- Where does the page end? If theirs end in a block of business identity and yours ends in a line of copyright, your footer has a hole where a convention goes.
- What is the contact route, and how many steps is it? A thread and a form are not the same offer to a visitor.
Three answers is enough. You are not trying to reverse-engineer a design here — you’re finding out which of these you inherited by accident, so it becomes a decision instead.
Translation and localization are different jobs
- Translation changes the words. It is necessary, and a page cannot ship without it.
- Localization rebuilds the frame the words sit in, to the conventions of the market reading it.
If your Korean page is translated and the response is still thin, the missing piece usually isn’t a better translation. It’s that the page is still shaped like the market it came from.
The other notes in this set: where machine translation stops, picking one Korean voice for your whole site, and what your layout does when the words become Korean.
When the page itself has to change
Some of this is a footer and a button. Some of it means the page was drawn around another market and needs redrawing around this one, and that’s the work I do: you bring the content, and I rebuild the pages so they hold it, to each market’s own conventions. Send a page and you get one exact number up front.