Owner's story · Tranzly
How Neil Lock builds Tranzly
Owner Neil Lock, Co-founder and developer · United Kingdom
Shared · 2 minute read
How it started
Tranzly is a WordPress translation plugin that Neil Lock builds, developed, sold and supported by his company, Zinn Digital® Ltd. Its plugin page first went up 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
A multilingual site usually costs speed and search ranking. On-the-fly translation adds queries to every page, its cookies get in the way of caching, and search engines are left guessing about languages. And most translation plugins meter words, so the bill grows with the site.
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. 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. The Pro edition covers the whole WooCommerce shop, builders such as Elementor, Divi and Bricks, team tools like a glossary and translation memory, and a switch from WPML, Polylang or TranslatePress.
The hard parts
The hard part was keeping a translated site fast: a translated page adds at most two database queries and sets no cookie, so page caches keep working. 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. Equally important: blocks and layouts survive untouched because only words change, and corrections made by a person stay protected.
Milestones
WordPress.org first listed Tranzly on 21 October 2020, and the first Tranzly 3 release, 3.18.0, landed there 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
Development goes on, with version 3.27.31 tested against WordPress 7.1 and the tranzly.io feature list generated from the plugin. Its 73 tools let AI assistants like Claude, ChatGPT and Cursor translate a site on the owner's behalf.
