Entrant story · Tranzly
The story of Tranzly, told through its developer Neil Lock
Entrant founder Neil Lock, Co-founder and developer · United Kingdom
Entered · Reading time 2 min
How it started
The translation plugin Tranzly is built by Neil Lock and developed, sold and supported by Zinn Digital® Ltd, his company. WordPress.org has listed the plugin since 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. 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. On top of that, many plugins sell translation by the word, so a bigger site means a bigger plan.
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. The words are translated by DeepL or an AI model on the owner's own account, the cost is estimated up front, and Tranzly never counts or sells words. 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
The hard part was keeping a translated site fast: a translated page adds at most two database queries and sets no cookie, so page caches keep working. 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. Equally important: blocks and layouts survive untouched because only words change, and corrections made by a person stay protected.
Milestones
The plugin reached WordPress.org on 21 October 2020; Tranzly 3 arrived there with version 3.18.0 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
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.
