Build log · Tranzly
Tranzly: the story of its builder, Neil Lock
Builder Neil Lock, Co-founder and developer · United Kingdom
Timestamp · 2 min transmission
How it started
Neil Lock builds Tranzly, a translation plugin for WordPress, and his company Zinn Digital® Ltd develops, sells and supports it. The first version appeared 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
The usual price of a multilingual WordPress site is a slower page and a less certain place in search. 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. And most translation plugins meter words, so the bill grows with the site.
What he built
Every translation is a real post linked to its original, at its own address (/about/ turns into /de/ueber-uns/), with permanent redirects in place. 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. Translation runs through DeepL or an AI model on the site owner's own account; Tranzly shows the estimated cost first and never counts 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
The challenge was speed, so a translated page costs at most two database queries and no cookie, and page caches carry on working. Measured on a clean WordPress test site on 2026-10-01, Tranzly 3.22.0 added 0.1 kB to the page and no requests to other companies' servers, with Lighthouse on phones at 100 before and after. 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. WordPress.org lists it as active on more than 7,000 sites, while tranzly.io shows the plugin at work in 58 languages.
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. AI assistants such as Claude, ChatGPT and Cursor can already translate a site through Tranzly's 73 tools.
