Founder side · Tranzly
Neil Lock and a faster multilingual WordPress
On Neil Lock, Co-founder and developer · United Kingdom
Written · 2 min to read
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. Like the other WordPress plugins Neil builds, Tranzly is made to WordPress.org's standards and kept up by the team behind the Zinn Digital® hosting.
The problem
Translation plugins have a habit of making sites slower and harder for search engines to read. Plugins that rewrite every page on the fly add database queries, set cookies that defeat page caches, and leave search engines unsure which page is 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. It adds reciprocal hreflang with x-default and canonicals, and lists every language in the sitemap of WordPress, Yoast SEO, Rank Math, SEOPress or All in One SEO. Site owners plug in their own DeepL or AI account and pay that service directly; Tranzly shows the likely cost first and sells no 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. 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. Layouts are left alone, since only the words are translated, and once a person corrects a translation, re-translation leaves it alone.
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. 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
Releases keep coming, with 3.27.31 tested on WordPress 7.1, and tranzly.io lists features straight from the plugin so the page follows each change. With 73 tools for AI assistants, Claude, ChatGPT or Cursor can do a site's translating for its owner.
