Story on file · Tranzly
Tranzly and the developer behind it, Neil Lock
Person on file Neil Lock, Co-founder and developer · United Kingdom
Placed on file · File length: 2 min
How it started
Tranzly comes from Neil Lock's workbench: he builds the plugin, and Zinn Digital® Ltd, the company he runs, develops, sells and supports it. Its plugin page first went up on WordPress.org on 21 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
The usual price of a multilingual WordPress site is a slower page and a less certain place in search. Plugins that rewrite every page on the fly add database queries, set cookies that defeat page caches, and leave search engines unsure which page is which language. Many translation plugins also sell words: a plan includes so many, and a bigger site needs a bigger plan.
What he built
Pages, products and menus become real pages in each language, each at a translated address like /de/ueber-uns/, and old addresses redirect permanently. 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. 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
Most of the effort went into speed: at most two database queries per translated page, no cookie, and caches left intact. Measured on a clean WordPress test site on 2026-10-01, Tranzly 3.22.0 added 0.1 kB to the page and no requests to other companies' servers, with Lighthouse on phones at 100 before and after. Translation never touches structure, code or links, only words, and human corrections are locked against being re-translated.
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. WordPress.org lists it as active on more than 7,000 sites, while tranzly.io shows the plugin at work in 58 languages.
What's next
Development goes on, with version 3.27.31 tested against WordPress 7.1 and the tranzly.io feature list generated from the plugin. Its 73 tools let AI assistants like Claude, ChatGPT and Cursor translate a site on the owner's behalf.
