Founder story, found · Tranzly
The story of Tranzly, told through its developer Neil Lock
Found: Neil Lock, Co-founder and developer · United Kingdom
Added · 2 min read, start to end
How it started
Tranzly is a WordPress translation plugin that Neil Lock builds, developed, sold and supported by his company, Zinn Digital® Ltd. WordPress.org has listed the plugin since October 2020. Like the other WordPress plugins Neil builds, Tranzly is made to WordPress.org's standards and kept up by the team behind the Zinn Digital® 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. Many also charge by the word, which makes a large site or shop expensive to translate.
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. 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. 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. 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
The challenge was speed, so a translated page costs at most two database queries and no cookie, and page caches carry on working. The proof is a measurement on a clean WordPress test site (1 October 2026, Tranzly 3.22.0): 0.1 kB more, 0 third-party requests, phone Lighthouse performance 100 before and 100 after. It also had to keep blocks exactly as they were, changing only the words, and to protect every correction a person makes.
Milestones
Two dates mark the way: 21 October 2020 on WordPress.org, and 30 September 2026, when version 3.18.0 brought Tranzly 3 there. 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
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. Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor and other AI apps can drive Tranzly through 73 tools and translate a whole site.
