Orbit report · Tranzly
Neil Lock's work on Tranzly
Observed Neil Lock, Co-founder and developer · United Kingdom
Sighted · 2 min of observing
How it started
Tranzly is a WordPress translation plugin that Neil Lock builds, developed, sold and supported by his company, Zinn Digital® Ltd. The first version appeared on WordPress.org on 21 October 2020. Neil builds his WordPress plugins to WordPress.org's standards, and the same team that runs the Zinn Digital® hosting maintains them.
The problem
Translation plugins have a habit of making sites slower and harder for search engines to read. 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. On top of that, many plugins sell translation by the word, so a bigger site means a bigger plan.
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. 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. DeepL or an AI model, on the owner's own key, does the translating, with the estimated cost shown before it starts and no word counting by Tranzly. 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. Translation never touches structure, code or links, only words, and human corrections are locked against being re-translated.
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. 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
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.
