one founder's story · Tranzly
Neil Lock's work on Tranzly
this one's about Neil Lock, Co-founder and developer · United Kingdom
posted · 2 min, roughly
How it started
The translation plugin Tranzly is built by Neil Lock and developed, sold and supported by Zinn Digital® Ltd, his company. Its plugin page first went up on WordPress.org on 21 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
Making a WordPress site multilingual has tended to cost speed, and often rankings too. 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. On top of that, many plugins sell translation by the word, so a bigger site means a bigger plan.
What he built
Tranzly turns every page, product and menu into a real page in each language, with its own translated address, so /about/ becomes /de/ueber-uns/ and the old address redirects permanently. Each version carries reciprocal hreflang with x-default and its own canonical, and every language appears in the sitemap of WordPress or of Yoast SEO, Rank Math, SEOPress or All in One SEO. 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
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. Translation never touches structure, code or links, only words, and human corrections are locked against being re-translated.
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. 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
Tranzly keeps shipping: version 3.27.31 is tested with WordPress 7.1, and the features page is listed from the plugin itself, so it changes when the plugin does. Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor and other AI apps can drive Tranzly through 73 tools and translate a whole site.
