TranslatePress Review: Pricing / Features / Alternative

Translatepress Free version

This plugin can be used for free. However, it only allows :

• One additional language
• No meta description translation available (bad for SEO)
• No machine translation
• No automatic redirection to the visitor’s language
• No specific menu for each language
• No translator account

Nevertheless, this can be totally sufficient for a showcase site, an e-commerce website, or a blog wanting to add a single language and translate it manually. Download the plugin

What is Translatepress?

TranslatePress allows you to transform your WordPress site into a multilingual site. It can be translated into one or more different languages, thus increasing its visibility towards other nationalities/languages.
I actually love using TranslatePress because it can automatically translate content with DeepL. But that’s all I’m saying, let’s find out more.

Translatepress specifications

Our Translatepress rating

Translatepress cost from 89€ to 249€ per year, depending on which plan you choose. It’s also available for free but without any advanced features.

Translatepress pricing plans

The personal plan at about 100€/year (VAT included) only allows you to get more languages and to get the translation of meta descriptions. It doesn’t offer Deepl machine translation (just Google), doesn’t offer redirection to the user’s language… I recommend you to choose the Business or Developer plan if you need a good machine translation and redirect users to their languages.

For the example, we show screenshots from our Ciroapp website.

Visual Translation interface

As you can see, we used TranslatePress on CiroApp. This allows us to automatically translate our content into several languages and automatically through Deepl. So we apologize if the Deepl translation is wrong.

To manually translate a sentence or a word, simply select it by clicking on it. Then in the left section, you can write the translation corresponding to the desired language.

If it is impossible to select the content you want to translate, you can select it by searching in the string list :

Type of content supported

You can translate every content! Even the content who doesn’t appear on your screen (meta description…). This is the list of the supported content:

• Posts and Pages
• Custom posts
• Categories and Tags
• Menus
• Theme and Plugin Texts (Gettext)
• Site Title and Description
• SEO Attributes
• Slug translation
• AJAX Content
• Dynamic content
• Translate entire paragraph

Comparison with other multilingual plugins of the type of content compatible

As you can see, TranslatePress is the most compatible plugin with all types of content.

Woocommerce Compatible

Currently, it is the only plugin that offers compatibility with Woocommerce in a free package. Moreover, it’s really super simple, you can translate everything from the product page: Attributes, short description, description, change images, meta description of the product, everything is possible.

Automatic Redirect user language

The “Automatic User Language Detection” addon is only available with a Developer or Business license.

When a visitor visits your website for his first time, it will be redirected to its preferred language based on browser settings or IP address. Then, the language is saved in a cookie so that any time it returns on the website, it will be automatically redirected to its last visited language.

You can choose between these methods:

• First by browser language, then IP address (recommended) will consider the user’s browser language setting. If it doesn’t match any of the site’s available languages, then the IP address of the user will be used to determine its preferred language.
• First by IP address, then browser language will determine the language by IP and if that fails then browser language is considered.
• Only by browser language or Only by IP address will not have a fallback user language detection method.

Google Indexing

Google understand browser language redirection and will redirect your users to the specific language URL.

Google can index your site for various IP addresses, but there’s no guarantee for how these redirects will affect your site indexing. This is happening because Google frequently updates their indexing algorithms, so nobody knows exactly how these are working.

You can use Google Webmaster Tool to see how is your site indexed.

One of the best methods to show your users that you have content in their language is to place a language switcher on your site.

Automatic Translations

Machine translation is only performed the first time the page loads in another language. So if a user changes the language of a page for the first time, it will translate directly on loading. The “Block Crawlers” function, therefore, prevents Google robots or other robots from acting as a user.

You should know that the robots explore all your pages so it will activate the translation of those.

Nevertheless, you can limit the translation with a maximum number of characters per day.

Google Translate automatic Translation

In order to create a Google Translate API Key you need a paid account. Through their terms and services, Google doesn’t allow for non-paid usage of their Translation API.

No, the Google Translation API is not free, they charge 20$ per million characters that you translate. You can read more about this here.

However, Google is offering a Free Trial option that gives you access to 300$ over 12 months that can be used towards the Google Translation API. This means that you can use it for free, within this limit, because TranslatePress is storing the translations locally.

The data is retrieved from Google only once, then it’s being served from your own database. Learn how to create the API key

Deepl automatic Translation

The Deepl Automatic Translation add-on is only available with a Developer or Business license. It lets you automatically translate your website through the Deepl API.

Deepl is a very powerful machine translation tool backed by artificial intelligence and neural networks. They charge 4.99€/month + 20€ per million characters that you translate.

Deepl gives you the possibility to limit the number of characters you translate each month. Simply enable Cost Control in your Account Settings. Click on “Change Cost Control Settings”, check the activation box, set a limit and apply the changes.

In order to use the API, you will need to get a key. The key can be purchased by following this URL.

Browse as Role

You can browse your website from the translation editor as yourself (logged in) or as a non-logged in user. This allows you to translate pages or strings that are dynamic based on logged in/non-logged-in status.

The Browse as Role add-on allows you to select any user role, then view the site like a user with that role would see it.

Conditional Shortcode Based on Language

Things like emails sent to users by different plugins can not be translated because they do not appear in the front-end. With shortcodes, you can add your content in every language and the specific language of the user will appear.

You can find shortcodes here.

This add-on allows you to add as many languages as you need to your WordPress site. You can select from a list of 221 secondary languages.

You can display the language as native language name in language switchers. You can also use a subdirectory (/en) for the default language.

Language Switcher

TranslatePress offers several ways to display the language switcher. This makes everyone happy and gives a lot of possibilities. Moreover, language switchers are modern and work without any problems.

There are actually 3 language switchers available:

• Shortcode: You can display the language switcher everywhere on your WordPress website by using the shortcode (I can’t write it because CiroApp is using the TranslatePress plugin.
• Menu item: You can add your language selector in the menu (look at the screenshot below).
• Floating language selection: A small floating pop up displayed everywhere on the website (look at the screenshot below).

You can also choose the appearance of your language switcher, you have the choice with :

• Full language names
• Short Language Names
• Flags with Full language names
• Flags with Short language names
• Flags Only

Navigation based on language

With the Navigation based on language add-on you can have menu items displayed or hidden based on the current language.

It helps you create multilingual menus that contain different menu items for different languages.

It’s useful when you want to display different pages for different languages. Or for when certain content is not translated in a specific language and you don’t want it to appear in the menu for that language.

Translator accounts

Using the Translator accounts add-on you can create or allow existing users to translate the site without admin access.

The translators will be able to translate the website (directly from the front-end) without having to work with the WordPress back-end, site builders or meta boxes.

SEO Feature

If you have the SEO plugin enabled, meta descriptions and titles will be translated automatically or manually.

It is possible to translate URLs, however, this can be problematic because of special characters and so on. I advise you not to check this box.

Then, excluding translated links from the sitemap is a bit silly, integrating everything in the SiteMap will help Google to index your pages. So I also advise you not to check this box.

The SEO add-on allows you to translate important SEO elements from every page:

• URL post/page/custom post type slug
• page title
• page description
• image alt tag
• Facebook and Twitter title and descriptions (these are usually added by your SEO plugin and appear when users share your content)

TranslatePress SEO Pack addon works out of the box with all SEO plugins.

Multilingual Sitemaps

Using the SEO Pack addon, TranslatePress will extend the Sitemaps functionality added by SEO plugins and automatically create a multilingual sitemap that includes all your translated content.
Your website sitemap will then correctly represent each individual translation.

Multilingual Sitemaps support is available for the most popular SEO plugins:

• Yoast SEO
• Rank Math
• SEOPress
• All in One SEO Pack

Having all the important SEO elements translated, as well as creating a multilingual XML Sitemap will have a major impact on your site ranking into multiple languages.

This table was created by TranslatePress, so they cannot provide a neutral opinion. However, I can confirm that this table is fair and respects reality.

Its only weakness

Of course, TranslatePress will not put it forward and besides, it concerns only a few people. Nevertheless, you should be aware of it. I will illustrate it with an example:

Let’s say your project is an international Marketplace, with several languages and the default language is English. It is possible that French, Italian, English and other vendors add their products to your Marketplace.

So a French person will put the French language and then enter their products in French. The problem is that its content entered in French language will be stored in the default language of the site (English).

I won’t explain to you the problem to explain to them, to change their content and so on… This project could work only if everyone put their content in English and then you translate this content into several languages (automatically with Deepl for example).

If you want users to be able to enter content in their language, you will have to use WPML in this case.

I’ll give you my personal opinion here. I’m a TranslatePress user on several of my WordPress sites, so I think this plugin is the best, or I won’t use it.

Most Powerful and lightweight multilingual WordPress plugin

A comparison of the loading time was made between the different multilingual plugins. We can see that the page with TranslatePress is the fastest to load both in the original and translated language.

As you must already know, higher loading time is not good for the referencing of your site and will definitely drive away your visitors. Using TranslatePress can ensure better SEO and satisfied visitors, so more money at the end of the day!

Customer Support

I didn’t need to contact customer support for a particular problem. However, for some questions, I got the answers within a day. This allows me to be reassured if a problem occurs on my site, I could surely be repaired within the day.

Translate your website perfectly with Deepl

I definitively love this plugin because of this feature. Deepl is an awesome translator system, you will be surprised by the quality of the translation, almost the same as a human translation for 1% of the price.

If you haven’t decided yet, try to navigate through our site by changing the language, you’ll see how easy and fast it is to use.

Automatic Translation

TranslatePress has the capability to do both automatic and manual translation. When you install the plugin for the first time, by default it will have the manual translation setting. You can change settings into automatic translation by going to settings.