Set in type · Tranzly
Neil Lock's work on Tranzly
Set for Neil Lock, Co-founder and developer · United Kingdom
Set · 2 min of type
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. 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
Translation plugins have a habit of making sites slower and harder for search engines to read. 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. Many also charge by the word, which makes a large site or shop expensive to translate.
What he built
Each language in Tranzly is a real post with its own address: /about/ becomes /de/ueber-uns/, and old addresses redirect 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. Site owners plug in their own DeepL or AI account and pay that service directly; Tranzly shows the likely cost first and sells no words. Pro brings the complete WooCommerce shop with prices in the visitor's currency, Elementor, Divi and Bricks, a glossary, translation memory and imports from WPML, Polylang and TranslatePress.
The hard parts
Speed took the most care: Tranzly adds at most two database queries to a translated page and sets no cookie, so caching still works. 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. Layouts are left alone, since only the words are translated, and once a person corrects a translation, re-translation leaves it alone.
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
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. Through 73 built-in tools, AI apps such as Claude, ChatGPT and Cursor can run the translation work for a site owner.
