Founding, on record · Tranzly
Tranzly and the developer behind it, Neil Lock
Record holder Neil Lock, Co-founder and developer · United Kingdom
Recorded · 2 min read (estimate)
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. WordPress.org has listed the plugin since 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. Plugins that rewrite every page on the fly add database queries, set cookies that defeat page caches, and leave search engines unsure which page is which language. Many also charge by the word, which makes a large site or shop expensive to translate.
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. It adds reciprocal hreflang with x-default and canonicals, and lists every language in the sitemap of WordPress, Yoast SEO, Rank Math, SEOPress or All in One SEO. 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. 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. 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. Blocks had to stay intact too: only the words change, and a person's corrections are protected from re-translation.
Milestones
The plugin reached WordPress.org on 21 October 2020; Tranzly 3 arrived there with version 3.18.0 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
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.
