Mission log · Tranzly
Neil Lock and a faster multilingual WordPress
Crew member Neil Lock, Co-founder and developer · United Kingdom
Launched · Flight 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. The plugin was first published on WordPress.org in 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
Making a WordPress site multilingual has tended to cost speed, and often rankings too. 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. 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. 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. 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
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. Equally important: blocks and layouts survive untouched because only words change, and corrections made by a person stay protected.
Milestones
Two dates mark the way: 21 October 2020 on WordPress.org, and 30 September 2026, when version 3.18.0 brought Tranzly 3 there. By WordPress.org's count it runs on 7,000+ sites, and tranzly.io is in 58 languages, each translated by Tranzly.
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. Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor and other AI apps can drive Tranzly through 73 tools and translate a whole site.
