Paddock story · Tranzly
Tranzly: the story of its builder, Neil Lock
Driver Neil Lock, Co-founder and developer · United Kingdom
Lights out · 2 min, lights to flag
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
A multilingual site usually costs speed and search ranking. Rewriting pages on the fly adds database queries, cookies stop page caches from working, and search engines cannot always tell which page is in which language. 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. It adds reciprocal hreflang with x-default and canonicals, and lists every language in the sitemap of WordPress, 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. 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
Most of the effort went into speed: at most two database queries per translated page, no cookie, and caches left intact. 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. Equally important: blocks and layouts survive untouched because only words change, and corrections made by a person stay protected.
Milestones
The plugin reached WordPress.org on 21 October 2020; Tranzly 3 arrived there with version 3.18.0 on 30 September 2026. It is active on more than 7,000 sites by WordPress.org's count, and its own site, tranzly.io, runs in 58 languages translated by the plugin.
What's next
Tranzly keeps shipping: version 3.27.31 is tested with WordPress 7.1, and the features page is listed from the plugin itself, so it changes when the plugin does. AI assistants such as Claude, ChatGPT and Cursor can already translate a site through Tranzly's 73 tools.
