Story · Tranzly
Tranzly: the story of its builder, Neil Lock
Founder: Neil Lock, Co-founder and developer · United Kingdom
Date · 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. Its plugin page first went up on WordPress.org on 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
Making a WordPress site multilingual has tended to cost speed, and often rankings too. When a plugin translates each page as it is served, the database works harder, cookies switch caching off, and the language of each page is unclear to search engines. Many also charge by the word, which makes a large site or shop expensive to translate.
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. Search engines get reciprocal hreflang with x-default, canonical addresses per language and sitemaps from WordPress, Yoast SEO, Rank Math, SEOPress or All in One SEO that include every language. DeepL or an AI model, on the owner's own key, does the translating, with the estimated cost shown before it starts and no word counting by Tranzly. 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. A test on a clean WordPress site on 1 October 2026 put a number on it: 0.1 kB added, 0 outside requests, and a phone Lighthouse performance score of 100 with or without Tranzly 3.22.0. Layouts are left alone, since only the words are translated, and once a person corrects a translation, re-translation leaves it alone.
Milestones
Tranzly was first published on WordPress.org on 21 October 2020, and version 3.18.0, the first Tranzly 3 release there, followed 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
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.
