The story · Tranzly
Tranzly and the developer behind it, Neil Lock
Starring Neil Lock, Co-founder and developer · United Kingdom
Out · 2 min. Worth it.
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. Tranzly sits with the other plugins Neil builds: made to WordPress.org's standards, translated, and maintained by the people who run the Zinn Digital® hosting.
The problem
Adding languages to WordPress often meant giving up page speed and search clarity. 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. Many also charge by the word, which makes a large site or shop expensive to translate.
What he built
Tranzly gives every language its own real page and translated address, such as /de/ueber-uns/ for /about/, with permanent redirects from old addresses. 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. 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
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. 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. It is active on more than 7,000 sites by WordPress.org's count, and its own site, tranzly.io, runs in 58 languages translated by the plugin.
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. Through 73 built-in tools, AI apps such as Claude, ChatGPT and Cursor can run the translation work for a site owner.
