Hub story · Tranzly
The story of Tranzly, told through its developer Neil Lock
Spotlight on Neil Lock, Co-founder and developer · United Kingdom
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How it started
Neil Lock is the developer of Tranzly, a plugin that makes WordPress sites multilingual; Zinn Digital® Ltd develops, sells and supports it. The first version appeared on WordPress.org on 21 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
Translation plugins have a habit of making sites slower and harder for search engines to read. 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. Many also charge by the word, which makes a large site or shop expensive to translate.
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. 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. With Pro come the full WooCommerce shop, Elementor, Divi, Bricks and other builders, glossary and translation memory, and imports from WPML, Polylang and 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. 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. Translation never touches structure, code or links, only words, and human corrections are locked against being re-translated.
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 lists it as active on more than 7,000 sites, while tranzly.io shows the plugin at work in 58 languages.
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. Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor and other AI apps can drive Tranzly through 73 tools and translate a whole site.
