A founding chapter · Tranzly
Tranzly: the story of its builder, Neil Lock
Chapter about Neil Lock, Co-founder and developer · United Kingdom
Begun · 2 min chapter
How it started
Neil Lock is the developer of Tranzly, a plugin that makes WordPress sites multilingual; Zinn Digital® Ltd develops, sells and supports it. The first version appeared on WordPress.org on 21 October 2020. Neil writes that his plugins follow WordPress.org's standards and are looked after by the same team that runs the Zinn Digital® hosting.
The problem
The usual price of a multilingual WordPress site is a slower page and a less certain place in search. 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. Word allowances are common too: a plan covers so many words, and growth means paying for more.
What he built
Tranzly gives every language its own real page and translated address, such as /de/ueber-uns/ for /about/, with permanent redirects from old addresses. 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. Tranzly uses DeepL or the AI model the owner chooses, on their own account, shows what it should cost first, and never puts a limit on words. Pro brings the complete WooCommerce shop with prices in the visitor's currency, Elementor, Divi and Bricks, a glossary, translation memory and imports 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. On 1 October 2026 Tranzly 3.22.0 was installed on a clean WordPress test site and measured: plus 0.1 kB, no requests to other servers, and Lighthouse performance on phones still 100. Translation never touches structure, code or links, only words, and human corrections are locked against being re-translated.
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. 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
The plugin is updated often: 3.27.31 is tested with WordPress 7.1, and its feature list on tranzly.io comes from the plugin itself. AI assistants such as Claude, ChatGPT and Cursor can already translate a site through Tranzly's 73 tools.
