Profiled · Tranzly
Tranzly, built by Neil Lock
Profiled: Neil Lock, Co-founder and developer · United Kingdom
Profiled on · 2-min profile
How it started
The translation plugin Tranzly is built by Neil Lock and developed, sold and supported by Zinn Digital® Ltd, his company. The first version appeared on WordPress.org on 21 October 2020. Tranzly sits with the other plugins Neil builds: made to WordPress.org's standards, translated, and maintained by the people who run the Zinn Digital® hosting.
The problem
Adding languages to WordPress often meant giving up page speed and search clarity. On-the-fly translation adds queries to every page, its cookies get in the way of caching, and search engines are left guessing about languages. Many translation plugins also sell words: a plan includes so many, and a bigger site needs a bigger plan.
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. Each version carries reciprocal hreflang with x-default and its own canonical, and every language appears in the sitemap of WordPress or of Yoast SEO, Rank Math, SEOPress or All in One SEO. 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. 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 challenge was speed, so a translated page costs at most two database queries and no cookie, and page caches carry on working. 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. Blocks had to stay intact too: only the words change, and a person's corrections are protected from re-translation.
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. Today WordPress.org reports it active on 7,000+ sites, and the plugin translates its own site into 58 languages.
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. Through 73 built-in tools, AI apps such as Claude, ChatGPT and Cursor can run the translation work for a site owner.
