TranslatePress review: The best WordPress translation plugin of 2023?

Expanding your business or blog to new countries can be a difficult and expensive task. To make your WordPress website translation you need to master another language and possibly hire translators, who often charge per word, to translate your content into this new language.

Then you have to process and manage these new translations in a translation plugin like WPML which are often cumbersome to handle and make your WordPress website a lot slower.

Fortunately, there is a user-friendly and simple WordPress translation plugin called TranslatePress that makes our lives as website owners a lot easier. It is, in our opinion, the best translation plugin of the moment.

TranslatePress offers an easy way to translate your website into any language. With this WordPress translation plugin, you can translate your website into any language with a few clicks using the DeepL translation software integration. With TranslatePress, you can make your WordPress website multilingual in no time.

In this TranslatePress review, I'll take you through the pros and cons, functionalities and give a short tutorial on how to set up the plugin for optimal use. 

TranslatePress functionalities

TranslatePress is a very powerful WordPress translation plugin that allows you to easily make your WordPress website multilingual. The power and simplicity of this plugin comes from a number of features that combine to make it the best translation plugin for WordPress:

• Translating entire pages, from shortcode to forms & page builders
• Translating dynamic strings & Large pieces of HTML (translation blocks)
• Translating images
• Automatic translations with DeepL & Google Translate
• Customizable language changer
• WooCommerce support
• SEO Pack
• Support for broad 221 languages
• Automatic language detection
• Translator accounts
• Navigation based on language

What is TranslatePress?

TranslatePress is a very powerful WordPress translation plugin that allows you to easily make your WordPress website multilingual.

Where other WordPress translation plugins such as WPML are enormously heavy and complex to use, TranslatePress is a breath of fresh air for anyone who wants to conquer the world with their WordPress website.

One of the powerful parts of TranslatePress is that you can translate pages and posts directly from the post's front-end. That means you see your changes in real time.

The plugin allows you to translate every piece of content on the website, from a piece of text to image. But also meta data, plugin and theme data. This can be useful when a theme or plugin is not fully translated into Dutch (or another language).

Don't have the knowledge, or budget, to translate every page into a new language? Then it offers convenient integration with translation software services: Google Translate or DeepL (our choice). Here you create an automatic translation to the language of your choice.

How does TranslatePress work?

Using TranslatePress is tremendously easy and getting started I explain in this short guide / tutorial.

Everything starts with purchasing the plugin through TranslatePress's website, here you choose the package that best suits your situation (more on this later).

Download the plugin, install and activate it on the WordPress website to be translated.

TranslatePress settings

After activating the plugin, a new functionality called Translate Site. Hover your mouse over the Translate Site button and click settings to view the settings page and set up the plugin.

Within the settings (general settings page), it is possible to select your default language. In addition, it is possible to select the additional languages you would like to extend the site to.

A adding language is easy:

1. Go to the section called "all languages" and select the language of your choice.
2. After selecting the appropriate language, press the "add" button next to the selected language.
3. After adding whether the translated text formal or informal should be. (This is used in automatic translations)

Repeat this process until you have added all the desired languages to the website.

Furthermore, the general settings page contains a number of other useful settings such as:

1. Native language name - Ability to show native language in the language changer
2. Subdirectory for default language - Ability to add a subdirectory in the URL for the native language
3. Force language in custom links - Force the language to remain intact in custom links without translation
4. Lanuage switcher - (De)Activate the language switcher in shortcode format, menu item and the "floating language switcher"

Automatic translations

In addition to the general settings, DeepL also has settings for automatic translations. This works through Google Translate or DeepL. On this page you specify API keys and set limits.

Addons

TranslatePress is expandable with several addons. A personal, developer or business license comes with the SEO Pack and Multiple Language addon installed.

1. With the SEO Pack addon get SEO support for page slug, page title, description and facebook and twitter social graph information. The HTML lang attribute is set correctly.
2. With the Multiple language addon you get the option to add as many languages as you need to make your project go global. Do not publish your language until all your translations are complete.

For the Business and Developer licenses, you get to install additional addons:

1. DeepL Automatic Translation: Automatically translate your website through the DeepL API.
2. Automatic User Language Detection: Automatically redirects new visitors to their preferred language based on browser settings or IP address and remembers last visited language.
3. Translator Accounts: Create translator accounts for new users or allow existing users who are not administrators to translate your website.
4. Browse As User Role: Navigate your website as a particular user role would. Very useful for dynamic content or hidden content that appears for certain users.
5. Navigation Based on Language: Set different menu items for different languages.

Click here if you want to read more about the different TranslatePress Addons.

License & Advanced Settings

As the name implies, you manage your license on the license page.

The advanced settings page gives you additional options to fine-tune TranslatePress to your liking:

1. Troubleshooting options: options that may be useful in case of any translation problems
2. Exclude strings: Exclude certain words or phrases from translation
3. Debugging: Debugging options
4. Various options: Under Miscellaneous you will find a host of case-specific options such as forcing slashes, date formats or tag settings such as hreflang

Translating the WordPress website

After setting up languages and general settings, you are ready to start implementing translations on the website.

As told earlier, this can be done in two different ways:

1. Real-time translations in a visual editor
2. Automatic translations via a service such as DeepL or Google Translate

Real-time translations

Let's start with the real-time translations.

We activate the real-time translator by pressing the "Translate Site" button in the top black bar (wherever we went to the settings), or the blue Translate site button within the settings.

After you press the "Translate Site" button, the real-time translation editor opens up. This interface is characterized by the translation sidebar on the left and the real-time website on the right.

Let's go through the simple steps with each other,

The important points in the real-time translator are as follows:

1. The language of the page and the piece of content (also technically called a "String").
2. Here shows the selected piece of text to translate. (fills automatically when selected via the pen, see #5)
3. Show translations as a type of role user such as administrator, current user etc.
4. Select a specific piece of content on the website to translate
5. Save the translation (CTRL+S also possible)

Case study

Let's take a real-life example where we translate a sentence from our home page into English.

Suppose we have the sentence / string "Are you ready for online results" want to translate into English, then we can select the string from the dropdown (1.2) or mouse over the text in the website view and click on the pen (1.1).

Then the sentence is selected and listed as a source by the plugin (2). Here you can clearly see that the source is Dutch and it can start being translated into the actively set languages; in our case English.

To translate the sentence to the active language, enter the translation at the appropriate input field with the country designation above it (3).

After the translation is entered, move on to the next sentence and publish the changes by pressing "save translation" or CTRL+S on Windows.

After viewing the site in English, we see that the sentence has been successfully translated into English.

WordPress automatic translation with TranslatePress

No time, language skills or simply don't feel like translating every piece of content on a page by hand?

Then TranslatePress has integrations with translation software like Google Translate and DeepL (we use these ourselves). These integrations analyze the website and, through an API, translate the entire website into the selected language in no time.

In our opinion, DeepL gives more natural and accurate translations and is therefore our choice for mass translations in WordPress projects to a new language.

TranslatePress Deepl API integration

To automatically translate WordPress with DeepL, a number of steps must be taken:

1. Making a DeepL API account + API key
2. Purchasing / having a TranslatePress Business or Developer license
3. Activating the DeepL addon.
4. Setting of the addon and automatic translations.

Creating DeepL API account

1. Make a free DeepL API account to the website of DeepL
2. Click on your account name at the top right and go to the account settings and then click on the "account" tab.
3. On the account page, you will find the authentication key for DeepL API at the bottom.
4. Copy the authentication key and save it so it can be used later in the DeepL Addon.

Developer or Business license + activation addon

Make sure you have a Developer or Business version of TranslatePress. I'll explain the pricing for these later in this review.

Don't have a proper license or haven't installed it yet? Then the addons, including DeepL, will not be available to download and activate.

Note: The Business / Developer variant is additional, so you will soon have 2 TranslatePress plugins active.

Log in to your TranslatePress account and under "file Downloads" choose "TranslatePress Developer" or "TranslatePress Business" depending on the license you have.

Install the plugin and go to the add-on page in the settings to activate the DeepL Automatic translation addon (with the developer version this is automatic, but check it anyway).

Setting DeepL integration

Now that the DeepL addon is active, we can start setting up the functionality.

Copy the DeepL API Key from the first step and navigate to Settings -> TranslatePress -> Automatic Translation. 

1. Activate here the automatic translation by setting the field to "yes".
2. Put the translation engine at DeepL.
3. Select the type API , free or paid.
4. Copy the saved DeepL API key from previous steps and paste it into the DeepL API Key field.

If you don't come out despite the above steps, you can always use the official TranslatePress DeepL documentation consult.

When is a WordPress page automatically translated?

Now that we have the automatic DeepL translation set up, the next question, of course, is ... and now?

Does DeepL translate the entire website immediately after saving? Or do any operations still need to take place?

Getting the plugin to automatically translate a page requires a simple step:

Visiting a page.

The plugin automatically translates the page to the set language(s) at the time you or a visitor visits the page.

Want to adjust the translation or speed up the process? Then visit the page in question and adjust the translation by pressing the "translate site" button in the black admin bar again.

In the example below, we simply translate our WP Rocket review article.

Calculation example costs

To give an example of the cost of translating through the DeepL Pro API I explain the translation of this blog post.

This article consists of plus minus 16,500 characters with about 3,000 words, which I want translated into English.

Thus, at the time of translation, the API consumes 16500 characters with a total cost of €0.33

As you can see in the example above, I set a limit through cost control to avoid looking at unexpected costs.

Compare this to a traditional translator (and thus not including the number of hours you need to fill the items, wat al snel kan oplopen bij het ontbreken van een stagiaire 😉 ):

Translations from Dutch to English cost roughly between €0.06 and €0.25 per word. (so not per character)

Roughly speaking, the costs are thus between €180 and €750.

Compare this with the cost of €0.33 for the total item, then of course this is a wonderful alternative.

TranslatePress price & discounts

Now that we know strength of TranslatePress, it is time to look at the cost of this translation plugin.

TranslatePress has a number of licensing models from free to a developer license for unlimited use. Below I explain the variants:

1. Free: The free variant is downloadable from WordPress.org. This variant contains fewer options than the paid licenses.
2. Personal: Single-site license with SEO integration and multiple language capability.
3. Business: 3-site license with the personal functionalities plus all the pro-addons such as DeepL integration and translator accounts.
4. Developer: License for unlimited use with all functionalities of business. Perfect choice for web development companies.

Therefore, choose the license that best suits your situation. Note again, if you want automatic translations, then a personal license not enough.

Conclusion

TranslatePress is our eyes the best WordPress translation plugin of the moment. This is because it is easy to use, relatively inexpensive, it is tremendously lightweight compared to WPML and it includes useful add-ons such as DeepL integrations for automatic translations.

This all adds up to huge savings in time and costs, and this in turn makes it a perfect match for our customers who want to expand into Germany, France or English-speaking countries, for example.

The DeepL integration ensures that we do not have to translate every piece of content by hand, or hire an expensive translator per word. In doing so, we efficiently make the website multilingual.

TranslatePress FAQ - Frequently Asked Questions

Do you still have questions after reading this review? Then we have listed the most frequently asked questions about this plugin. Is the question not among them? Then feel free to ask the question in the comments below this review.