The best WordPress translation plugins, compared (2026)

The right WordPress translation plugin depends on two questions: do you want each language stored as its own WordPress post, and do you want a person to approve translations before visitors see them? WPML and Polylang store a post per language. TranslatePress, Weglot, GTranslate and LangRelay translate the page WordPress renders and keep one post.

They also differ in who decides what goes live. LangRelay puts translations live by default, with free checks that hold a page with untranslated text, the wrong language or a changed price, or waits for your approval on every page when you choose Ask me first, and WPML can be set to hold AI translations for a Translation Manager. Polylang saves DeepL output as a draft for you to publish. Weglot's current plugin puts translations in front of you to review and lets you publish or unpublish each language. TranslatePress has no per-translation hold once automatic translation is on, but lets you publish a language only when its translations are done. GTranslate's free widget translates in the visitor's browser as the page loads.

I make LangRelay, one of the six plugins here. Everything about the other five comes from their own pricing pages, documentation and WordPress.org listings, read on 6 October 2026.

The short answer#

• WPML fits sites that want every language as a real WordPress post, with review controls for AI translation. Paid only, from €39 a year.
• Polylang fits sites that want a post per language and are happy to translate by hand or with their own DeepL account. Free on WordPress.org, Pro from €99 a year.
• TranslatePress fits sites that want one post per page, a visual editor and translations kept in their own database. Free for one extra language, paid from €99 a year.
• Weglot fits sites that want a hosted service that also covers platforms beyond WordPress. Free up to 2,000 words, paid from €15 a month excluding VAT.
• GTranslate fits sites that want a flat-price translation proxy, and personal or nonprofit sites that can live with its free browser widget, which is not licensed for commercial use. Paid from $12 a month.
• LangRelay fits WordPress sites that change often and want translations live by default, with free checks that hold a page with untranslated text, the wrong language or a changed price. Free plan, paid plans on the pricing page.

Two ways a plugin stores a translation#

A post-per-language plugin adds a second WordPress post for every translation, tied to the original. You edit, query and keep each language like any other content. The cost arrives with every edit: a change to the original leaves the other posts behind until they are retranslated or updated.

A rendered-page plugin keeps one post and stores the translations separately, then swaps them into the page as it is served. Layout, blocks and images stay shared across languages, and an edit only creates new sentences to translate. The cost is that translations live outside your posts, sometimes on the vendor's servers.

The article on running WordPress in two languages without duplicating pages works through both models with an example edit.

WPML#

WPML is a post-per-language plugin: every translation is a WordPress post of its own, and WPML records which posts belong together in its own database table.

It is sold from wpml.org only. Its old core listing on WordPress.org says the plugin was closed in November 2017 and is not available there.

What it does well:

• URL options for every taste: a directory per language, a domain per language or a language parameter, and subdomains are possible too.
• Its documentation describes hreflang with an x-default in the page head, and hreflang entries inside the Yoast SEO and Rank Math XML sitemaps.
• Its own AI engine, PTC, can publish translations immediately, hold them as drafts until a Translation Manager approves them, or publish and queue them for review. PTC is also the engine that gets glossary support and learns from your edits.

Pricing, from wpml.org on 6 October 2026: Multilingual Blog is €39 for one production site and does not include AI translation. Multilingual CMS is €99 for three production sites with 22,500 AI words, and Multilingual Agency is €199 for unlimited sites with 45,000 AI words. Each includes a year of support and updates, with a 30-day money-back guarantee. Pay-as-you-go AI words cost from €3.00 down to €0.40 per 1,000 excluding VAT, counted from your source content once per language. With Translate Everything Automatically and PTC, WPML tracks the highest word count you paid for per page and language, and only new words above it cost more.

Polylang#

Polylang also stores a post for every language. Through Polylang Pro's REST API support, each post reports the IDs of the posts that translate it, keyed by language.

The free plugin on WordPress.org showed 900,000+ active installations on 6 October 2026, and its listing says there is no limit on the number of languages and that it works with Yoast SEO. Polylang's features page lists a subdirectory, a subdomain or a separate domain per language, and credits Polylang with hreflang tags and language-dependent meta tags. Pro adds Open Graph tags as well.

Translation itself is up to you. Polylang Pro connects to DeepL through your own DeepL account and saves DeepL's output as a draft post. According to Polylang's DeepL guide, later changes to the original do not flow into that translation, and the integration cannot handle content built with Elementor, Divi and some other page builders.

Pricing, from polylang.pro on 6 October 2026, excluding VAT: Polylang Pro is €99 a year for one site, €198 for three, €297 for five and €495 for 25. The page says renewals currently get a 50% discount. Refunds are possible within 30 days of the original purchase, after you have let Polylang try to fix the problem through a support ticket. DeepL usage is billed by DeepL on your own account.

TranslatePress#

TranslatePress keeps one post and stores translations string by string in its own tables in your WordPress database. Because each translation belongs to one exact piece of original text, changing that text, even by a word, leaves it untranslated again. An optional Automatic Translation Memory carries the old translation over when under 5% of the text changed.

Its translation editor works on a live preview of the page, so you can translate theme and page-builder text where it appears. Automatic translation is something you switch on. Once it is on, its AI page says new content is translated as you go and you won't need to review it unless you prefer to. The free plugin's feature list includes publishing a language only when all its translations are done, and the free version can also connect to Google Translate through your own Google Cloud account.

The SEO Pack, included in every paid plan, translates page titles, descriptions, URL slugs, image alt text and social tags, and the Business and Developer plans add a domain per language.

The free plugin on WordPress.org showed 400,000+ active installations on 6 October 2026. Per its listing, the free version supports your default language plus one translation language, with 2,000 AI words.

Pricing, from translatepress.com on 6 October 2026: Personal is €99 a year for one site with 50,000 AI words, Business €199 a year for three sites with 200,000, and Developer €349 a year for unlimited sites with 500,000. Plans are billed yearly and renew automatically, with a 15-day money-back guarantee.

Weglot#

Weglot's WordPress plugin adds language URLs without adding any pages to WordPress itself, and the translations are kept on Weglot's servers, as its WordPress.org listing states. It showed 50,000+ active installations on WordPress.org on 6 October 2026. Weglot's integrations page names Shopify and plain JavaScript sites alongside WordPress, which matters if you run more than one kind of site.

Weglot's plugin listing for its 2.0 release says Weglot puts every translation in front of you to review before you publish, with a publishing workflow that controls when each language goes live and lets you publish or unpublish per language. Its help center adds that when automatic content translation is switched off, newly detected content needs your approval before its translation is shown.

Pricing, from weglot.com on 6 October 2026, monthly and excluding VAT: Free covers 2,000 words and one language. Starter is €15 a month (€150 a year) for 10,000 words and one language, Business €29 for 50,000 words and three languages, Pro €79 for 200,000 words and five languages, and Advanced €299 for 1,000,000 words and ten languages. Weglot's words are the total unique words translated across all your languages, a fixed limit that does not renew, so each language counts: Weglot's own example is 20 pages of 500 words in two languages, or 20,000 words.

GTranslate#

GTranslate's WordPress plugin showed 900,000+ active installations on 6 October 2026. The free version translates in the visitor's browser: its listing says the widget sends page text from the browser to Google for translation and that the free version gives no SEO advantage. Version 5.0.1 replaced Google's legacy website translator widget with GTranslate's own, after Google announced that support for the old widget would end on 1 October 2026.

Commercial or revenue-generating use of the free service needs a paid subscription, its listing says, and that includes WooCommerce stores. The paid plans work as a translation proxy, with translated pages on subdomains or subdirectories that search engines can index, and they do not limit words or translated pageviews. GTranslate's site notes that subdirectories need PHP support on your server, while subdomains need no software on it.

Pricing, from gtranslate.io on 6 October 2026, in US dollars: Custom from $12 a month ($120 a year) for one extra language, Startup $25 a month, Business $35 a month and Enterprise $50 a month.

LangRelay#

LangRelay keeps one post. The plugin takes the HTML WordPress produces for each request and swaps in the translations approved in the LangRelay Dashboard. By default a translation goes live as soon as it is ready, and free checks hold a page with untranslated text, the wrong language or a changed price. To approve every page yourself, choose Ask me first. Each language is served under a subdirectory such as /de/, with hreflang tags (including x-default), a canonical URL for each language and the lang attribute set, and titles and meta descriptions are translated with the rest of the page. When you edit a page, the plugin tells LangRelay roughly a minute after you publish, and only the text you changed goes back through translation.

LangRelay also has Relay, an agent in the Dashboard that answers questions about your site and prepares edits when you ask for them. Relay reviews any page you ask it to, the way a language expert would, and tells you the cost in AI credits before it starts. Every change Relay proposes still waits for a person's approval. The visual editor lets you click text on the translated page and edit it in desktop, tablet or mobile width.

Where it falls short today: the Dashboard offers nine languages (Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish and Turkish), translated slugs are set by hand per page, and the plugin does not add translated pages to your XML sitemap. If you need a separate domain per language today, WPML and Polylang offer one, and so do TranslatePress's Business and Developer plans. For hreflang inside your XML sitemaps, WPML adds it when Yoast SEO or Rank Math runs alongside its WPML SEO add-on.

Pricing, from LangRelay's own plan catalog on 19 October 2026: the Free plan includes 2,000 words a month for one site and one language; Starter is €19 a month for 50,000 words a month across up to three sites. Current prices are on the pricing page.

Is there a free WordPress translation plugin?#

Yes. Polylang's free plugin has no language limit, but you write the translations or connect DeepL through Pro. TranslatePress is free for one extra language with 2,000 AI words. GTranslate's free widget offers every language it supports and translates in the browser, with no SEO value because the translated pages have no URLs of their own, and it is not licensed for commercial or revenue-generating sites. Weglot's and LangRelay's free plans each cover one language with a small word allowance.

Which plugin is best for multilingual SEO?#

Search engines need a URL per language and hreflang tags that connect the versions. Every plugin here except GTranslate's free tier gives each language its own URL. WPML puts hreflang in the page head, and in the Yoast SEO or Rank Math sitemap when its WPML SEO add-on is active. Polylang, free and Pro, adds hreflang tags; TranslatePress adds them automatically, and its SEO Pack on paid plans translates titles, descriptions and slugs. Weglot adds hreflang tags and translates meta descriptions, and its help center says it leaves out x-default unless you add it yourself. LangRelay adds hreflang with x-default and translates titles and meta descriptions with the page, but adds nothing to your sitemap. The guide to translating a WordPress site shows exactly which tags LangRelay adds and how to check them on any site.

If you have already picked a storage model, the next decision is usually the switcher; language switcher best practices covers it. For a wider comparison that includes non-WordPress tools, see the website translation software guide, and if you want to see LangRelay on your own site first, book a demo.