Founder file · Tranzly
Neil Lock and the making of Tranzly
Subject Neil Lock, Co-founder and developer · United Kingdom
Filed · Reading time: 2 minutes
How it started
Neil Lock builds Tranzly, a translation plugin for WordPress, and his company Zinn Digital® Ltd develops, sells and supports it. WordPress.org has listed the plugin since 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
Adding languages to WordPress often meant giving up page speed and search clarity. When a plugin translates each page as it is served, the database works harder, cookies switch caching off, and the language of each page is unclear to search engines. Many also charge by the word, which makes a large site or shop expensive to translate.
What he built
Tranzly turns every page, product and menu into a real page in each language, with its own translated address, so /about/ becomes /de/ueber-uns/ and the old address redirects 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. 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
Speed took the most care: Tranzly adds at most two database queries to a translated page and sets no cookie, so caching still works. Measured on a clean WordPress test site on 2026-10-01, Tranzly 3.22.0 added 0.1 kB to the page and no requests to other companies' servers, with Lighthouse on phones at 100 before and after. Layouts are left alone, since only the words are translated, and once a person corrects a translation, re-translation leaves it alone.
Milestones
After its first WordPress.org release in October 2020, Tranzly 3 went out on WordPress.org as 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
Development goes on, with version 3.27.31 tested against WordPress 7.1 and the tranzly.io feature list generated from the plugin. Through 73 built-in tools, AI apps such as Claude, ChatGPT and Cursor can run the translation work for a site owner.
