Dated story · Tranzly
Building Tranzly: Neil Lock
Scheduled founder Neil Lock, Co-founder and developer · United Kingdom
Dated · 2 min slot
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
Adding languages to WordPress often meant giving up page speed and search clarity. Translating pages at the moment they load means extra database queries, cookies that defeat the cache, and pages whose language search engines cannot pin down. And most translation plugins meter words, so the bill grows with the site.
What he built
Every translation is a real post linked to its original, at its own address (/about/ turns into /de/ueber-uns/), with permanent redirects in place. 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. 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
Most of the effort went into speed: at most two database queries per translated page, no cookie, and caches left intact. Measured on a clean WordPress test site on 2026-10-01, Tranzly 3.22.0 added 0.1 kB to the page and no requests to other companies' servers, with Lighthouse on phones at 100 before and after. Layouts are left alone, since only the words are translated, and once a person corrects a translation, re-translation leaves it alone.
Milestones
Two dates mark the way: 21 October 2020 on WordPress.org, and 30 September 2026, when version 3.18.0 brought Tranzly 3 there. WordPress.org now counts it active on 7,000+ sites, and tranzly.io itself is published in 58 languages, every one 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. With 73 tools for AI assistants, Claude, ChatGPT or Cursor can do a site's translating for its owner.
