From the workshop · Tranzly
Neil Lock on building a translation plugin without word limits
Maker Neil Lock, Co-founder and developer · United Kingdom
Finished · 2 min at the bench
How it started
The translation plugin Tranzly is built by Neil Lock and developed, sold and supported by Zinn Digital® Ltd, his company. Its plugin page first went up on WordPress.org on 21 October 2020. Neil writes that his plugins follow WordPress.org's standards and are looked after by the same team that runs the Zinn Digital® hosting.
The problem
The usual price of a multilingual WordPress site is a slower page and a less certain place in search. On-the-fly translation adds queries to every page, its cookies get in the way of caching, and search engines are left guessing about languages. On top of that, many plugins sell translation by the word, so a bigger site means a bigger plan.
What he built
Every translation is a real post linked to its original, at its own address (/about/ turns into /de/ueber-uns/), with permanent redirects in place. Reciprocal hreflang with x-default, canonical addresses and every language in the sitemap of WordPress, Yoast SEO, Rank Math, SEOPress or All in One SEO help search engines find each version. The words are translated by DeepL or an AI model on the owner's own account, the cost is estimated up front, and Tranzly never counts or sells words. On top of the free plugin, Pro handles the whole WooCommerce shop, Elementor, Divi, Bricks and more, a glossary and translation memory, and moves sites over from WPML, Polylang and TranslatePress.
The hard parts
Keeping pages quick was the difficult bit, and the result is at most two extra database queries per translated page and no cookie to break the cache. The proof is a measurement on a clean WordPress test site (1 October 2026, Tranzly 3.22.0): 0.1 kB more, 0 third-party requests, phone Lighthouse performance 100 before and 100 after. Blocks had to stay intact too: only the words change, and a person's corrections are protected from re-translation.
Milestones
Two dates mark the way: 21 October 2020 on WordPress.org, and 30 September 2026, when version 3.18.0 brought Tranzly 3 there. 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
Work continues release by release; version 3.27.31 is tested with WordPress 7.1, and the feature list on tranzly.io is read from the plugin itself. Through 73 built-in tools, AI apps such as Claude, ChatGPT and Cursor can run the translation work for a site owner.
