Welcome to the first episode of the Tranzly podcast. This show is for anyone who has ever tried to translate a WordPress site and watched something break. Speed dropped. Rankings slipped. Or maybe you just paid for words and felt something was wrong. We are here to figure out why. The plugin we built to solve all of this is at https://tranzly.io/ and you can grab the free version to follow along.

Here is the thing nobody explains before you install a translation plugin. Most of them rewrite your pages on the fly. Every visitor hits the database. Your page cache breaks. Cookies get set. And search engines get confused about which page is which language. Your German version exists, but Google cannot quite find it. Your Arabic version loads slow because it rebuilds itself every single time. You are paying for all this and it works against you.

We dig into what a proper multilingual setup actually looks like. Each language gets its own real page with its own address. No rewriting. No cookies. Minimal database queries. Your cache keeps working. Search engines see each language clearly with proper hreflang tags and sitemap entries. The setup adds almost nothing to your page weight and makes zero requests to external servers.

Then we talk about money. Most translation plugins sell words. You buy a plan, you hit the limit, you upgrade. For a big shop, that adds up fast. But the actual translation service, DeepL or Google, charges you directly and usually costs just a few dollars. Why is the plugin company sitting in the middle taking their cut? We break down how to connect your own account, keep your keys encrypted, and translate everything without word limits or surprise bills.

WooCommerce gets its own section because translating a shop is a different beast. Product variations, attributes, cart, checkout, account pages, payment texts, every customer email in the order language. Price and stock stay in sync. Currency switches per language or per country or by visitor choice. Most plugins handle the products okay. The checkout flow, the emails, the currency switching, that is where things fall apart.

If you are on WPML, Polylang, or TranslatePress and thinking about switching, we cover the migration path too. Your existing translations come along. Nothing gets lost or overwritten.

Tell us what to cover next: DeepL versus AI models, right to left language quirks, or hreflang with multiple SEO plugins.