Story, listed · Tranzly
Tranzly, built by Neil Lock
Listed founder Neil Lock, Co-founder and developer · United Kingdom
Listed · Read time: 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. Tranzly has been on WordPress.org since 21 October 2020. On his own site, Neil describes his WordPress plugins as built to WordPress.org's standards, translated, and maintained by the team that runs his hosting.
The problem
Adding languages to WordPress often meant giving up page speed and search clarity. Rewriting pages on the fly adds database queries, cookies stop page caches from working, and search engines cannot always tell which page is in which language. Word allowances are common too: a plan covers so many words, and growth means paying for more.
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. 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. Tranzly uses DeepL or the AI model the owner chooses, on their own account, shows what it should cost first, and never puts a limit on words. Tranzly Pro adds the whole WooCommerce shop, page builders such as Elementor, Divi and Bricks, a glossary and 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. 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. Blocks had to stay intact too: only the words change, and a person's corrections are protected from re-translation.
Milestones
After its first WordPress.org release in October 2020, Tranzly 3 went out on WordPress.org as version 3.18.0 on 30 September 2026. Today WordPress.org reports it active on 7,000+ sites, and the plugin translates its own site into 58 languages.
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. Its 73 tools let AI assistants like Claude, ChatGPT and Cursor translate a site on the owner's behalf.
