Founder story · Tranzly
Neil Lock and a faster multilingual WordPress
Featuring Neil Lock, Co-founder and developer · United Kingdom
First published · 2 min read
How it started
Neil Lock builds Tranzly, a translation plugin for WordPress, and his company Zinn Digital® Ltd develops, sells and supports it. Tranzly has been on WordPress.org since 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. 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 translation plugins also sell words: a plan includes so many, and a bigger site needs a bigger plan.
What he built
Pages, products and menus become real pages in each language, each at a translated address like /de/ueber-uns/, and old addresses redirect 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. 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. 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
Speed took the most care: Tranzly adds at most two database queries to a translated page and sets no cookie, so caching still works. On 1 October 2026 Tranzly 3.22.0 was installed on a clean WordPress test site and measured: plus 0.1 kB, no requests to other servers, and Lighthouse performance on phones still 100. Blocks had to stay intact too: only the words change, and a person's corrections are protected from re-translation.
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. WordPress.org now counts it active on 7,000+ sites, and tranzly.io itself is published in 58 languages, every one translated by Tranzly.
What's next
The plugin is updated often: 3.27.31 is tested with WordPress 7.1, and its feature list on tranzly.io comes from the plugin itself. With 73 tools for AI assistants, Claude, ChatGPT or Cursor can do a site's translating for its owner.
