On the record · Tranzly
Neil Lock and a faster multilingual WordPress
Concerning Neil Lock, Co-founder and developer · United Kingdom
Entered into the record · 2-minute read
How it started
Tranzly comes from Neil Lock's workbench: he builds the plugin, and Zinn Digital® Ltd, the company he runs, develops, sells and supports it. The first version appeared on WordPress.org on 21 October 2020. Neil builds his WordPress plugins to WordPress.org's standards, and the same team that runs the Zinn Digital® hosting maintains them.
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. Word allowances are common too: a plan covers so many words, and growth means paying for more.
What he built
Tranzly turns every page, product and menu into a real page in each language, with its own translated address, so /about/ becomes /de/ueber-uns/ and the old address redirects 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. 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. 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
Keeping pages quick was the difficult bit, and the result is at most two extra database queries per translated page and no cookie to break the cache. 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. It also had to keep blocks exactly as they were, changing only the words, and to protect every correction a person makes.
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. Today WordPress.org reports it active on 7,000+ sites, and the plugin translates its own site into 58 languages.
What's next
Tranzly keeps shipping: version 3.27.31 is tested with WordPress 7.1, and the features page is listed from the plugin itself, so it changes when the plugin does. Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor and other AI apps can drive Tranzly through 73 tools and translate a whole site.
