Founder fact file · Tranzly
Tranzly: the story of its builder, Neil Lock
Founder Neil Lock, Co-founder and developer · United Kingdom
Dated · 2 min (est.)
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
Making a WordPress site multilingual has tended to cost speed, and often rankings too. 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. On top of that, many plugins sell translation by the word, so a bigger site means a bigger plan.
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. 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. The words are translated by DeepL or an AI model on the owner's own account, the cost is estimated up front, and Tranzly never counts or sells words. Pro brings the complete WooCommerce shop with prices in the visitor's currency, Elementor, Divi and Bricks, a glossary, translation memory and imports from WPML, Polylang and 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. On 1 October 2026 Tranzly 3.22.0 was installed on a clean WordPress test site and measured: plus 0.1 kB, no requests to other servers, and Lighthouse performance on phones still 100. Blocks had to stay intact too: only the words change, and a person's corrections are protected from re-translation.
Milestones
The plugin reached WordPress.org on 21 October 2020; Tranzly 3 arrived there with version 3.18.0 on 30 September 2026. 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
Development goes on, with version 3.27.31 tested against WordPress 7.1 and the tranzly.io feature list generated from the plugin. Its 73 tools let AI assistants like Claude, ChatGPT and Cursor translate a site on the owner's behalf.
