From the grid · Tranzly
Why Neil Lock builds Tranzly the way he does
On the grid Neil Lock, Co-founder and developer · United Kingdom
Green flag · 2 min, flat out
How it started
Neil Lock builds Tranzly, a translation plugin for WordPress, and his company Zinn Digital® Ltd develops, sells and supports it. The plugin was first published on WordPress.org in 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
Adding languages to WordPress often meant giving up page speed and search clarity. 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 translation plugins also sell words: a plan includes so many, and a bigger site needs a bigger plan.
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. 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. 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
Speed took the most care: Tranzly adds at most two database queries to a translated page and sets no cookie, so caching still works. Rather than just calling it light, the team measured it on a clean WordPress test site on 1 October 2026: Tranzly 3.22.0 added 0.1 kB and no requests to other companies' servers, and the Lighthouse performance score on phones stayed at 100. It also had to keep blocks exactly as they were, changing only the words, and to protect every correction a person makes.
Milestones
The plugin reached WordPress.org on 21 October 2020; Tranzly 3 arrived there with version 3.18.0 on 30 September 2026. By WordPress.org's count it runs on 7,000+ sites, and tranzly.io is in 58 languages, each translated by Tranzly.
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. Its 73 tools let AI assistants like Claude, ChatGPT and Cursor translate a site on the owner's behalf.
