Field note · Tranzly
Neil Lock and a faster multilingual WordPress
Field subject Neil Lock, Co-founder and developer · United Kingdom
Logged · 2 min field read
How it started
The translation plugin Tranzly is built by Neil Lock and developed, sold and supported by Zinn Digital® Ltd, his company. Its plugin page first went up on WordPress.org on 21 October 2020. On his own site, Neil describes his WordPress plugins as built to WordPress.org's standards, translated, and maintained by the team that runs his hosting.
The problem
Making a WordPress site multilingual has tended to cost speed, and often rankings too. 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. 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. The Pro edition covers the whole WooCommerce shop, builders such as Elementor, Divi and Bricks, team tools like a glossary and translation memory, and a switch from WPML, Polylang or TranslatePress.
The hard parts
Keeping pages quick was the difficult bit, and the result is at most two extra database queries per translated page and no cookie to break the cache. 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
WordPress.org first listed Tranzly on 21 October 2020, and the first Tranzly 3 release, 3.18.0, landed there on 30 September 2026. 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
Development goes on, with version 3.27.31 tested against WordPress 7.1 and the tranzly.io feature list generated from the plugin. Its 73 tools let AI assistants like Claude, ChatGPT and Cursor translate a site on the owner's behalf.
