Founding log · Tranzly
How Neil Lock builds Tranzly
Subject Neil Lock, Co-founder and developer · United Kingdom
Committed · 2 min read
How it started
The translation plugin Tranzly is built by Neil Lock and developed, sold and supported by Zinn Digital® Ltd, his company. Tranzly has been on WordPress.org since 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
The usual price of a multilingual WordPress site is a slower page and a less certain place in search. 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. 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. 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
The challenge was speed, so a translated page costs at most two database queries and no cookie, and page caches carry on working. 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. 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
Releases keep coming, with 3.27.31 tested on WordPress 7.1, and tranzly.io lists features straight from the plugin so the page follows each change. Through 73 built-in tools, AI apps such as Claude, ChatGPT and Cursor can run the translation work for a site owner.
