Shopkeeper's story · Tranzly
Tranzly, built by Neil Lock
The shopkeeper Neil Lock, Co-founder and developer · United Kingdom
Opened · 2 min browse, no hurry
How it started
Neil Lock builds Tranzly, a translation plugin for WordPress, and his company Zinn Digital® Ltd develops, sells and supports it. Its plugin page first went up on WordPress.org on 21 October 2020. Tranzly sits with the other plugins Neil builds: made to WordPress.org's standards, translated, and maintained by the people who run the Zinn Digital® hosting.
The problem
The usual price of a multilingual WordPress site is a slower page and a less certain place in search. 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. And most translation plugins meter words, so the bill grows with the site.
What he built
Each language in Tranzly is a real post with its own address: /about/ becomes /de/ueber-uns/, and old addresses redirect permanently. For search, it writes reciprocal hreflang with x-default and canonical addresses, and puts each language into the WordPress, Yoast SEO, Rank Math, SEOPress or All in One SEO sitemap. 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. Tranzly Pro adds the whole WooCommerce shop, page builders such as Elementor, Divi and Bricks, a glossary and translation memory, and imports from WPML, Polylang and TranslatePress.
The hard parts
Most of the effort went into speed: at most two database queries per translated page, no cookie, and caches left intact. 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. 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
Work continues release by release; version 3.27.31 is tested with WordPress 7.1, and the feature list on tranzly.io is read from the plugin itself. Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor and other AI apps can drive Tranzly through 73 tools and translate a whole site.
