First look · Tranzly
The story of Tranzly, told through its developer Neil Lock
First person: Neil Lock, Co-founder and developer · United Kingdom
First seen · 2 min first read
How it started
Neil Lock builds Tranzly, a translation plugin for WordPress, and his company Zinn Digital® Ltd develops, sells and supports it. The plugin was first published on WordPress.org in October 2020. Like the other WordPress plugins Neil builds, Tranzly is made to WordPress.org's standards and kept up by the team behind the Zinn Digital® hosting.
The problem
Adding languages to WordPress often meant giving up page speed and search clarity. Translating pages at the moment they load means extra database queries, cookies that defeat the cache, and pages whose language search engines cannot pin down. On top of that, many plugins sell translation by the word, so a bigger site means a bigger plan.
What he built
Tranzly turns every page, product and menu into a real page in each language, with its own translated address, so /about/ becomes /de/ueber-uns/ and the old address redirects permanently. For search, it writes reciprocal hreflang with x-default and canonical addresses, and puts each language into the WordPress, Yoast SEO, Rank Math, SEOPress or All in One SEO sitemap. DeepL or an AI model, on the owner's own key, does the translating, with the estimated cost shown before it starts and no word counting by Tranzly. The Pro edition covers the whole WooCommerce shop, builders such as Elementor, Divi and Bricks, team tools like a glossary and translation memory, and a switch from WPML, Polylang or TranslatePress.
The hard parts
The hard part was keeping a translated site fast: a translated page adds at most two database queries and sets no cookie, so page caches keep working. A test on a clean WordPress site on 1 October 2026 put a number on it: 0.1 kB added, 0 outside requests, and a phone Lighthouse performance score of 100 with or without Tranzly 3.22.0. It also had to keep blocks exactly as they were, changing only the words, and to protect every correction a person makes.
Milestones
Tranzly was first published on WordPress.org on 21 October 2020, and version 3.18.0, the first Tranzly 3 release there, followed on 30 September 2026. By WordPress.org's count it runs on 7,000+ sites, and tranzly.io is in 58 languages, each translated by Tranzly.
What's next
Releases keep coming, with 3.27.31 tested on WordPress 7.1, and tranzly.io lists features straight from the plugin so the page follows each change. With 73 tools for AI assistants, Claude, ChatGPT or Cursor can do a site's translating for its owner.
