6 Best WordPress Translation Plugins For A Multilingual Website

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PluginPlugin Key FeaturesDirect Link
Weglot✓ High-quality translations
✓ Quick and easy installation
✓ All-in-one interface with 100+ languages
✓ 100% Compatible with themes
✓ Multilingual SEO optimization
✓ Free and pro versions available
Download
WPML✓ High-quality translations
✓ Compatible with any theme or plugin
✓ Flexible translation management
✓ Glossary and translation memory
✓ Multilingual SEO optimization
✓ Only pro version available
Download
Polylang✓ Extensive content translation
✓ User-friendly and efficient
✓ Compatible with major SEO plugins
✓ Compatible with most cache plugins
✓ 700,000+ users worldwide
✓ Free and pro versions available
Download
GTranslate✓ High-quality translations
✓ Search engine friendly
✓ Option for translation editing
✓ Offers usage statistics
✓ Seamless updates
✓ Free and pro versions available
Download
Loco Translate✓ Built-in translation editor
✓ Integrates with popular translation APIs
✓ Directly create & update language files
✓ Keyboard shortcuts for faster translating
✓ Protected language directory
✓ Free and pro versions available
Download
TranslatePress✓ Translate directly from the front-end
✓ Fully compatible with all themes and plugins
✓ Translation of images, sliders, and media
✓ Manual and automatic translation options
✓ Integrates with Google Translate
✓ Free and pro add-ons available
Download
Best WordPress Translation Plugins
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Are you struggling to pick the best WordPress translation plugin to help you create a multilingual site?

Well, it’s a difficult decision to make because it’s hard to switch plugins down the road, so you want to make sure that you get things right from day one.

But do not worry…

To help, I’ve collected six of the best WordPress translation plugins for you. For each plugin, I’ll list its key features and try to share the pros and cons of how it handles WordPress translations.

I’ll start sharing the plugins in just a minute, but first, I think it’s important that you consider one question…

Do You Want Manual Or Automatic Translation?

With translation plugins, you have two main translation methods available to you:

  • Manual translation: You’ll need to actually write each individual translation, or hire someone to do it for you. It’s more time-consuming and expensive, but it ensures that your translations are perfect.
  • Automatic translation: Your site will be automatically translated by a computer. Kind of like how Google Translate works. It’s easy and fast but can lead to errors and weird phrasing because computer translation isn’t 100% foolproof.

You can also adopt a hybrid method where you translate your site automatically and then go back and manually fix any errors.

Some of these plugins let you use both methods, while others are more focused on just one approach. You should make sure to pick the plugin that fits your unique needs.

I’ll make sure that it’s clear which method(s) each translation plugin supports.

6 Best WordPress Translation Plugins In 2022

1. Weglot

Weglot takes a completely different approach to WordPress translation. It can be a little expensive depending on your needs, but it’s also very convenient and has some great time-saving features.

Here’s how Weglot works:

  • You connect your WordPress site to the cloud-based Weglot service.
  • Weglot automatically translates your entire site using machine translation.
  • You can manually edit the machine translations in the user-friendly Weglot cloud interface, or you can outsource manual translations to professional translators.
Weglot interface
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Weglot translates 100% of your site, even including little details like your Yoast SEO meta titles and descriptions. And it also creates an SEO-friendly URL structure that Google can crawl and index.

Pros of Weglot:

  • It’s the most user-friendly translation plugin you’ll find.
  • The setup process is quick and painless. You can have a fully translated site in just a couple minutes. Then, all you need to do is manually correct the translations, if desired.
  • The Weglot cloud interface makes it very easy to manage your translations and/or outsource them to professional services.

The only potential con is the price. Because Weglot uses SaaS billing, you have to continue to pay to use the Weglot service (whereas many other translation plugins are one-time fees).

Weglot offers a limited free plan that lets you translate up to 2,000 words into one language. After that, paid plans start at €9.90 per month.

2. WPML

WPML is one of the most well-known WordPress translation plugins. Despite available only in a premium version, it’s massively popular and comes with tons of features to help you create a multilingual site.

Once you define which languages you want your site to be available in, WPML lets you translate your content using a simple side-by-side editor:

WPML WordPress Translation Plugin
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WPML lets you translate every single aspect of your site, including:

  • Theme text
  • Widget text
  • Page builder designs
  • Etc.

What’s great is the fact that all of your translated content is SEO-friendly. WPML creates a 100% unique version for your translated site that Google can fully index. And you can also choose how to structure your different translation versions. You can use:

  • Subdirectories
  • Different domains/subdomains
  • URL parameters

So how can you actually translate your site’s content with WPML? Well, the default focus is on manual translation. But it’s also possible to automatically translate your content with WPML.

See, another one of WPML’s helpful features is its Translation Manager. With this feature, you can:

  • Create special translation users at your site if you want to hire your own translator.
  • Connect to external translation services right from your dashboard.
WPML Translation Manager
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If you choose an external service that offers automatic translation, you can automatically translate your site that way.

WPML’s price starts at $29. But I highly recommend the $79 Multilingual CMS plan if you’re serious about creating a multilingual website.

3. Polylang

Active on over 700,000 sites, Polylang is one of the most popular free translation plugins at WordPress.org.

The free version lets you manually translate most of your site’s content. You can either use the string translations editor for site titles and theme text, or you can use a separate WordPress editor interface for translating individual pieces of content:

Polylang interface
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The translated versions of your site are also SEO-friendly and indexable. The only downside is that you’ll need the Pro version if you want to translate slugs in your URLs.

As for translation methods, the core Polylang plugin only supports manual translation.

But if you want to automatically translate your site, you can integrate with the separate Lingotek Translation plugin (from the same developer) to get access to automatic or professional translation.

4. GTranslate

At least in its free version, GTranslate is much more basic than any of the other plugins on this list. Instead of creating a separate multilingual version of your site, it lets you add a drop-down widget with country flags where users can dynamically translate your site using Google Translate.

GTranslate
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The benefits of this approach are:

  • It’s 100% free
  • It doesn’t take any time
  • You can include lots of languages because it’s automatic

But the cons:

  • Google won’t be able to index the translated versions of your site in the free version (the Pro version of the plugin enables multilingual SEO and SEO-friendly URLs)
  • The automatic translations might not always be accurate in the free version (the Pro version lets you manually correct translations, though)

If you want the Pro version for those extra features, plans start at ~$65 per year. Just one thing I don’t understand is, why they are not using SSL yet.

5. Loco Translate

By the numbers, Loco Translate is the most popular translation plugin at WordPress.org – active on 1 million+ sites.

It’s not quite the same as other plugins, though, because it’s more focused on localization than providing full content translation management. That makes it a good option for translation, but not necessarily for creating a multilingual site.

For example, there’s no language switcher.

Instead, it’s more focused on helping you localize your site. For example, it makes it easy to translate all the text in your theme into your native language.

To do that, you can use an in-dashboard PO editor. If you’re not familiar, a PO editor is a popular translation method where you basically see the:

  • Original translation on the left
  • Translated version on the right

You then translate each string one-by-one, with helpful keyboard shortcuts to speed up the process. You can see an example below:

Loco Translate
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For those reasons, if you just want access to translation to localize your site, rather than create a full multilingual site, Loco Translate is a great option.

6. TranslatePress

Finally, TranslatePress is a comparatively new freemium translation plugin that sits kind of between something like WPML/Polylang and something like Weglot.

That is, it offers a lot of the convenience of Weglot, but inside your WordPress dashboard and for a one-time fee.

To translate your content, TranslatePress gives you a live front-end interface based on the WordPress Customizer. You can translate everything about your site, even down to Yoast SEO titles and descriptions and image alt text (with the premium version):

TranslatePress
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All your different translations are also SEO-friendly, which means they get separate URL structures and Google can crawl them.

TranslatePress supports both manual and automatic translation. If you opt for automatic translation, TranslatePress uses the Google Translate API.

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The free version is a great option if you just need a basic translation into a single language. But if you want more control over SEO and access to multiple different languages, you’ll need one of the pro plans which start at €79.

What’s The Overall Best WordPress Translation Plugin?

I don’t think there’s one “best WordPress translation plugin” for every single site.

Instead, it depends on your needs and budget.

If you’re willing to spend some money, Weglot is the easiest and most convenient option.

If you want a one-time fee plugin, WPML is the gold standard.

And if you’re looking for a quality free plugin, I like Polylang and TranslatePress.

Do you have any other questions about these plugins? Or would you recommend a different WordPress translation plugin? Leave a comment!

Here are a few hand-picked guides for you to read next:

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Authored By
A Blogger, Author and a speaker! Harsh Agrawal is recognized as a leader in digital marketing and FinTech space. Fountainhead of ShoutMeLoud, and a Speaker at ASW, Hero Mindmine, Inorbit, IBM, India blockchain summit. Also, an award-winning blogger.

11 thoughts on “6 Best WordPress Translation Plugins For A Multilingual Website”

  1. Patrick McDermott

    My experience with WPML has not been good. After weeks of working with their support, they finally admitted it would not work for my circumstances (on a GoDaddy-hosted WP site). Then, they refused to give me my money back. So unhappy with WPML!

  2. Alex

    I’ve also used WPML but switched to Neuronto now. Their AI brings the best translation quality

  3. Sajid Akhter

    Hi Harsh,

    Great list of plugins. of all the plugins discussed here, I think WPML looks good to me. It has good features. Though it comes at a price however it is worth paying if you are getting quality products which helps you moving forward.

    Thanks for sharing this post. have a good day. 🙂

  4. Arun MK

    I think WordPress just keeps getting better. Having people read your site content is different languages is very fantastic. Being multilingual you have more visitors and readers.

    I guess you have forgotten Genesis Translations by Remkus de Vries. It’s a simple plugin that translates perfectly to danish for example. Though it is made for the Genesis Framework, if one is using this, it is a very good plugin.

    1. Harsh Agrawal

      @Arun
      Thanks for the recommendation and the reason I have not included this plugin is that this plugin translates the text strings of the Genesis Framework. This plugin does not translate your content (post/pages).

  5. Vishwajeet Kumar

    Hello Harsh,

    Translating your website definitely helps to get more readers for your blog. Weglot is a robust website translation tool and its flawlessly translate your whole website content and gives good reading experience. I have tested it on some of my development sites and the results are highly productive. I will be launch it on my live sites soon.

    Have a Great day 🙂
    Vishwajeet

  6. Irfan Tahir

    i have used WPML, it is the best translating plugin with a lot of features

  7. Vipin

    may be these plugins may help me when after getting success in English language i will move to other non English speaking countries. While talking about audience we should have this thing in our mind that worldwide majority of population is non English speaking.

  8. Divya Thakur

    Hi, Harsh Agrawal
    Thanks for sharing about these plugin today I learned some new knowledge from this post. keep sharing such as like this informative article.

  9. Naina roy

    Wao Harsh ! I really needed it.
    I was struggling to find such translator from few days .I was doing research on weglot from few days.And my mind was convincing me to use this.your this post gave approval to my mind
    Thank you

    1. Harsh Agrawal

      @Naina
      Yah Weglot is pretty solid. I tested it last year and liked what I saw. https://www.shoutmeloud.com/translate-wordpress-site-wegot-plugin.html

      Do come back and share your experience in terms of traffic and overall growth after translating your website into other languages. It would be great to learn from your experience.
      If you have done the extensive test, you can also share your experience as a guest post here at ShoutMeLoud.

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