Programme note · Tranzly
From one language to many: Neil Lock and Tranzly
Featuring Neil Lock, Co-founder and developer · United Kingdom
Opened · Running time 2 min
How it started
Tranzly is a WordPress translation plugin that Neil Lock builds, developed, sold and supported by his company, Zinn Digital® Ltd. WordPress.org has listed the plugin since October 2020. Neil builds his WordPress plugins to WordPress.org's standards, and the same team that runs the Zinn Digital® hosting maintains them.
The problem
A multilingual site usually costs speed and search ranking. 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
Pages, products and menus become real pages in each language, each at a translated address like /de/ueber-uns/, and old addresses redirect permanently. Search engines get reciprocal hreflang with x-default, canonical addresses per language and sitemaps from WordPress, Yoast SEO, Rank Math, SEOPress or All in One SEO that include every language. 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. 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. Rather than just calling it light, the team measured it on a clean WordPress test site on 1 October 2026: Tranzly 3.22.0 added 0.1 kB and no requests to other companies' servers, and the Lighthouse performance score on phones stayed at 100. Translation never touches structure, code or links, only words, and human corrections are locked against being re-translated.
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
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. AI assistants such as Claude, ChatGPT and Cursor can already translate a site through Tranzly's 73 tools.
