Author name: John

Translating your WordPress website into multiple languages is one of the easiest ways to reach a wider audience, boost your SEO traffic, and increase your sales. But with so many translation plugins available, choosing the right one can feel overwhelming. TranslatePress and WPML are established plugins with years of proven history, while Universally is a newer plugin that takes a different, more modern approach to translation. I’ve tested all three on real WordPress sites. In this ultimate comparison, I’ll walk you through how they stack up on setup, translation quality, SEO, performance, WooCommerce support, customer support, and pricing so you can choose the right one for your business. TL;DR: Universally is the best fit for most users, with the fastest setup, cloud performance, and the lowest entry price. TranslatePress is great if you want a live visual editor, and WPML wins for complex WooCommerce stores. Read on for the full breakdown. Plugin Best For Starting Price TranslatePress Visual editing, data ownership, flat-fee pricing Free core; from €99/yr WPML Developers, WooCommerce stores, agencies From €39/yr Universally Fastest setup, cloud performance, budget-conscious sites Free; from $7.50/mo For more information on each plugin, see our detailed WPML and Universally reviews and our guide to using TranslatePress. If you’re also considering free or lower-cost alternatives, Polylang is worth a look. We cover it in our roundup of the best WordPress translation plugins. My comparison covers seven criteria. You can use the quick links below to jump to any section: Ease of Setup Translation Quality Multilingual SEO Performance and Site Speed WooCommerce Support Customer Support Pricing TranslatePress vs WPML vs Universally: Which One Is Better? Frequently Asked Questions About Translation Plugins Additional Resources About WordPress Translation Ease of Setup Translating your WordPress site into multiple languages should be as painless as possible. Two of these tools can get you live in another language in under 10 minutes. The third takes considerably more work, so it’s worth understanding what’s involved before you commit. Below, I break down how each tool handles setup. TranslatePress – Ease of Setup The TranslatePress setup is simpler than WPML’s. You install the plugin from WordPress.org, select your languages in the settings, and the front-end translation editor becomes available immediately (with no API key required). From there, you click ‘Translate Site’ in the WordPress admin bar and start clicking on any text element on your live page to translate it. There are no backend spreadsheets and no separate dashboard. One thing to know upfront: automatic language detection (showing visitors a prompt to switch to their preferred language) requires the Business plan at €199/year (~$230 USD). On the Personal plan, you can add a language switcher, but visitors choose the language themselves. WPML – Ease of Setup WPML requires more up-front configuration than both the other plugins. The Multilingual CMS plan requires at minimum two separate plugin components: WPML core for your posts and pages, and String Translation for your theme, plugin, and widget text. Each component has its own setup wizard, and translations don’t happen automatically. You trigger them page by page, or enable ‘Translate Everything’ mode and configure how your automatic translation credits are spent. In my testing, even translating a straightforward site took the better part of an hour. On a larger site with a complex theme or custom post types, plan for more time still. That complexity exists for a reason. WPML gives you a level of granular control that TranslatePress and Universally don’t offer. But if you don’t need that level of control, the overhead isn’t worth it. Universally – Ease of Setup Universally surprised me with how little it asks of you. Just install the plugin, paste your API key from the Universally dashboard, and choose your target languages. That’s the entire process. The language switcher appears on your site automatically. There’s no shortcode to place, no template editing, and no per-page translation to trigger. Language detection, SEO configuration, and switcher positioning all happen without any additional setup. That means most sites are live in another language in under 10 minutes. Winner for Ease of Setup: Universally Universally is the fastest by a clear margin, and TranslatePress is a solid second. The visual editor is intuitive and setup is much simpler than WPML’s, but it’s not quite as instant as Universally’s API-key flow. For most site owners who want to get started without spending an afternoon on configuration, Universally or TranslatePress is the better choice. WPML’s setup overhead is only worth it if you specifically need the depth it provides. Translation Quality Machine translation has improved significantly, and all three of these tools produce readable output for most language pairs. Where they differ is in how you fix errors and how much editorial control you have over the final result. TranslatePress – Translation Quality TranslatePress uses a combination of large language models and neural machine translation engines. It automatically selects the best approach for each language pair and content type. All paid plans include TranslatePress AI with varying word allowances. DeepL (a highly accurate premium AI translation engine) integration is available on Business and Developer plans for users who prefer it. What sets TranslatePress apart from both alternatives is the front-end visual editor, which is available on every plan including free. You can click directly on any text element on your live page and type the corrected translation in the sidebar. The page updates in real time as you type. Translation Memory is also included on all plans and applies existing translations automatically to new strings with at least 95% similarity, which means you’re not re-translating the same content repeatedly. WPML – Translation Quality WPML takes a fundamentally different approach: it’s manual by default, meaning you control every translated string. Machine translation is available as a paid add-on through DeepL, Google Translate, and Microsoft Azure Translator. Credits are included with CMS and Agency plans, and the workflow is built around human review rather than publishing AI translated output directly. The Advanced Translation Editor gives professional translators

WordCamp Europe, the biggest WordPress conference in Europe, spent the first week of June in Kraków. The 2026 edition of this event filled the ICE Kraków Congress Centre from June 4 to 6, drawing 2,458 ticket holders from 81 countries to the south of Poland. Close to a quarter of them were attending their first WordCamp Europe. The city made it easy to settle in. Every attendee’s badge carried a transport hologram good for unlimited trams and buses. The Main Market Square, the largest in Europe, sat a short ride away, and the local food ran the gamut from pierogi to żurek soup to obwarzanek pretzels sold off the street. Kraków is beautiful, with history everywhere.– Sebastian Miśniakiewicz, local team lead The program kept pace with the setting. Across multiple tracks, the schedule held 49 talks and eight hands-on workshops, grouped into themes that ran from core development and AI to business and the open web. Around them sat a full Contributor Day, a sponsor area, side events, on-site childcare, and an after-party the local team stretched to eight hours. Contributor Day Opens the Week As it does every year, the event began the day before the talks. Contributors filled the venue for Contributor Day, a working session where people work together to improve WordPress itself rather than watch a presentation about it. The morning started with registration and a welcome, the room split into teams, and a group photo broke up the work around midday. The afternoon ran a second working block before each team gathered to share what it had done. The range of tables is the clearest picture of how wide the project has become. Newcomers could sit down with Polyglots to translate WordPress into their own language, with Documentation to fix the pages people reach when they get stuck, or with Support to answer questions in the forums. More technical tables covered Core, Performance, Testing, Themes, and the Plugins team, whose reviewers screen every plugin submitted to the directory. First-timers were not left to find their own way. The day was built around onboarding tables, named table leads, and mentors, with an open invitation for experienced contributors to adopt a newcomer and walk them through their first patch, string, or ticket. People who could not travel to Kraków were welcomed to join remotely through the #contributor-day channel in the Make WordPress Slack, so distance was not a reason to sit the day out. The Birthplace of the Web It was fitting that the opening keynote came from CERN. The European Laboratory for Particle Physics, on the French-Swiss border outside Geneva, is where the World Wide Web was invented more than 30 years ago, and Joachim Valdemar Yde, who has managed CERN’s web team since 2021, came to explain why the laboratory had chosen WordPress to carry its web presence forward. Yde and Francisco Borges Aurindo Barros, who leads CERN’s WordPress infrastructure, framed the move as a chance to give a web presence built up over three decades a shared, modern foundation. After evaluating several leading content management systems against CERN’s needs, WordPress came out on top. Barros walked through what they had built. The guiding idea is that people at CERN focus on their content while the web team looks after the platform underneath. A self-service portal lets anyone request a site in a few clicks. Behind it, a shared distribution supplies a common theme and a set of approved, security-hardened plugins, and an in-house tool provisions each new site on Kubernetes in about a minute. In its first year, the platform has already set up hundreds of sites. Moving years of existing content onto the new platform is the other half of the work, and the team automated it: a single command lifts each site’s pages, headings, and images and rebuilds them as Gutenberg blocks, with no downtime. They plan to open source the tool. Then Yde delivered the line that the room had been waiting for. As of today, our main flagship website, home.cern, is now served on WordPress. It’s been automatically migrated, and it’s live. – Joachim Valdemar Yde, Web Manager, CERN The rollout is on track to wrap up over the coming months, and early impressions, Yde said, have been overwhelmingly positive, with easy wins in responsiveness and accessibility. For those at the event, the keynote pointed the room toward a later talk by CERN’s Akanksha Chatterjee on building and maintaining the laboratory’s engineering websites on the same service. There is a neat symmetry to it. The institution that published the world’s first website now runs on the software that powers more than 40% of today’s web, licensed under the GPL and maintained by the people in the room. WordPress 7.0 and AI WordPress 7.0 was a throughline of the conference. Several sessions placed the release at the center, framing it less as a routine update than as a change in what the software is, and in what it makes possible for the people who build with it. The anchor for that conversation was a panel called “Inside WordPress 7.0.” It gathered contributors who worked on the release, among them Juan Manuel Garrido, Adam Silverstein, Benjamin Zekavica, Sarah Norris, and Milana Cap. It was framed around more than a feature list, setting out to cover how a release of this size actually comes together: the contribution workflows, the coordination, and the human aspects of shipping software in the open. What gives this release its weight is the work moving into WordPress’s core: a native AI client, a new Abilities API that lets plugins declare what they can do in a way other tools can discover, and a Connectors screen for wiring up providers such as OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google Gemini. The argument running through the AI sessions was that this belongs to everyone who builds on WordPress, not only to developers shipping their own integrations. Speakers got specific about how to put that to work. Anukasha Singh focused on how the

Hi there, This is the time of the year when publishing on the Gutenberg Times becomes less frequent. I will be on vacation and back at the beginning of July with the weekend edition, just in-time for Beta 1 of WordPress 7.1. Three more Gutenberg plugin releases will happen before that. What also happened was that someone grabbed my instagram account in this AI hack at Meta. Although Meta reports this as resolved, I probably won’t get my account back. I am now actively looking for a better way to share my photos without the overlords that can’t keep things tight. It’s not that I didn’t know better. <sigh/> It’s a cautionary tale for what’s in store for all internet services handing over crucial business processes to a gulliable AI. Don’t let the small stuff bring you down. Have a splendid weekend ahead. Until July! Yours, Birgit I started watching WordCamp Europe LiveStreams on Friday and started with the keynote Two worlds collide: WordPress at CERN with Joachim Valdemar Yde and Francisco Borges Aurindo Barros. The Livestream are all routed to the WordPress YouTube account. The schedule is posted on the website. Over the course of the weekend more recordings will be uploaded to WordPress TV > WordCamp Europe 2026. On Saturday, Matt Mullenweg, co-founder of WordPress and CEO of Automattic will close out WordCamp Europe 2026 with his keynote. Afterward, the organizers will reveal where WordCamp Europe 2027 will take place. Tune in around 2:15 UTC / 8:15 am EDT. I had the great pleasure chatting with Abha Thakor on the OpenMakers through what WordPress 7.0 “Armstrong” means for you. First, the safety bit: test on a staging site or Playground before updating, and check your PHP. Then the good stuff. Visual revisions show edits in context with color coding. Notes keep feedback inside the editor. Patterns gain content-only editing, blocks can hide by device, and new AI connector APIs give developers a unified foundation. Real-time editing waits for a later release. Developing Gutenberg and WordPress Arthur Chu walks you through what’s new in Gutenberg 23.3. The modal media editor is now the default for cropping. It pulls cropping, flip, rotation, and metadata into one place. The experimental customizable dashboard grows too, with five new widgets you can drag and resize. Responsive styles now reach individual blocks, so designs adapt per screen. Rae Morey reports that Gutenberg 23.3 brings an experimental, customizable WordPress dashboard. It’s the admin’s biggest structural shakeup in years. You can drag, resize, and rearrange widgets like Welcome, Activity, and Site Health to fit how you actually work. It’s the first testable preview of a long-discussed overhaul. Enable it under Gutenberg > Experiments to try it. Jarda Snajdr reports that the React 19 upgrade has been reverted in Gutenberg. Shortly after 23.3.0 shipped, many plugins built for React 18 started crashing. The APIs barely changed, but the runtimes clashed: React 19 rejects elements made by a bundled React 18 JSX helper. So 23.3.2 rolls back to React 18. The team still plans the upgrade for 7.1—this time with a feature flag and a compatibility layer. Isabel Brison and I chatted extensively about the latest Gutenberg plugin releases 23.1 to 23.3 and discussed the responsive controls now available in the Gutenberg plugin for desktop, tablet and mobile view ports. The episode will drop in your favorite podcast app over the weekend. The latest episode is Gutenberg Changelog #130 – WordPress 7.0, Gutenberg 22.9 and 23.0, WordCamp Europe, Block Themes and More with Tammie Lister, Chief Product Officer at Convesio Rich Tabor shares a few “little big things” for WordPress editing. The idea is simple: complexity has piled up, and small fixes can clear it. His PRs make block locking a one-click job in List View. They keep you in place when editing synced patterns, instead of whisking you off to another view. And zooming out reuses the familiar Patterns Explorer. He’s not precious about them—contributors are warmly invited to take them over the line. Dave Smith walks you through an interactive prototype reimagining the WordPress Site Editor around user goals rather than system architecture. Built during Automattic’s Radical Speed Month, it keeps the same blocks, templates, and data model intact while changing entry points, language, and defaults. It’s an experiment, not a roadmap. Calls for Testing for WordPress 7.1 With WordPress 7.0 out the door, contributors shared a series of Calls for testing this week to prepare for WordPress 7.1. The schedule is tight with Beta 1 slated for July 15, 2026. Ramon Dodd puts out a call for testing the new Media Editor Modal. Cropping in the block editor hasn’t changed much in years, and the old inline tool leans on a limited third-party library. This new standard way of Image edition inside the Block editor replaces it with a WordPress-native one. You get freeform and aspect-ratio cropping, flip, rotation, and metadata editing in one place. The quickest way to try it is a ready-made Playground link. Feedback is welcome via the comments or GitHub. Anne McCarthy announced a collaborative editing outreach effort for WordPress 7.1. After real-time collaboration was pulled from 7.0, this gathers real-world early adopters across many hosting setups to find bugs faster. It lives in one Slack channel, #collaborative-editing-outreach. If you’d use collaborative editing regularly and run the latest Gutenberg, you’re invited—through the cycle, with a test team badge at the end. Rae Morey has the skinny for you in Contributors Launch FSE-Style Outreach Program to Get Real-Time Collaboration Ready for WordPress 7.1 Adam Silverstein puts out a call for testing client-side media processing, now targeting WordPress 7.1. Here’s the idea: when you upload an image, your browser resizes and encodes every size locally using VIPS in WebAssembly, before anything reaches the server. That eases CPU and memory load on hosts and brings modern formats like AVIF, WebP, HEIC, and JPEG XL to every site. Browsers that can’t cope fall back quietly to server-side. Try it in Chromium with the latest

Cześć wszystkim, Kraków… I made the call not to fly to Poland for WordCamp Europe. I’m very sorry for the last-minute notice; I was really hoping to make it. I’m okay, but I want to stay close to loved ones going through difficult times. Seeing the pictures from Contributor Day warms my heart. Bardzo za Wami tęsknię. I miss you dearly. The Protect The Shire post on W.org contains what I planned to talk about, and Mary Hubbard and Matías Ventura will lead the Q&A keynote at the end. I’ll watch all the sessions so if any WordCamp speakers would like feedback on their talk, just fill out this form, and I’ll write something up and message it to you on the .org Slack. 

Meta started rolling out its WhatsApp AI agent (officially called Meta Business Agent) to eligible businesses worldwide. Its AI agent can answer questions, recommend products, and qualify leads for your business around the clock. For small businesses, that means you don’t have to hire additional staff to qualify leads. Since it works 24/7, no need to worry about missed messages during non-work hours. The problem is that it only works inside WhatsApp, so the visitors sitting on your website right now never see it. What if I told you that you can put that same AI agent to work right on your WordPress site? That means you can turn your casual visitors into qualified leads before they ever click away! In this guide, I’ll show you how to set up Meta’s WhatsApp AI agent and connect it to your WordPress site, step by step. Quick Summary: First, turn on Meta’s Business AI inside the WhatsApp Business app. Then install WPChat on WordPress, connect your WhatsApp Business number, and set up an on-site Smart FAQ. Visitors get instant answers on your site and flow into WhatsApp, where Meta’s AI handles the rest. Setup takes about 30 minutes. What Is Meta’s WhatsApp AI Agent? Meta Business Agent is an AI assistant that lives inside WhatsApp Business and Instagram direct messages (DMs). More than a million businesses are already using it in countries like India and Brazil. Meta is now expanding it to more businesses worldwide. Once it’s set up, it can answer customer questions 24/7, suggest products from your catalog, book appointments, and collect lead details. It also hands the conversation to a real person whenever the customer asks or the question gets too complex. For now, small and medium businesses can use it for free through the WhatsApp Business app. Meta has said larger businesses will eventually pay based on usage through a Premium plan. Here’s the catch: Meta’s AI agent only works inside WhatsApp. It does not place a chatbox on your website, so a visitor browsing your homepage has no way to reach it unless you give them one. Why Connect Meta’s WhatsApp AI Agent to Your WordPress Site? For a small business, this isn’t just a cool integration… It’s about capturing sales you’re currently losing: Catch customers at the exact moment. Your visitors are on your website, not in their WhatsApp app, when they’re deciding whether to purchase from you. Having a conversation with them at the right moment removes the friction that makes people bounce Get your time back (without hiring anyone). As a small business owner, you can’t be glued to your phone answering the same questions all day and night. Meta Business Agent handles the repetitive stuff for you 24/7, so you don’t have to worry about after-hours messages. Start helping visitors today, even before Meta reaches you. Meta’s agent is still rolling out, so it may not be available for your account yet. With the WPChat plugin, your visitors get instant AI-powered answers right now, so you don’t have to wait to start converting. Now let’s set everything up. 👇 Step 1: Turn On Meta’s Business AI in WhatsApp Before you add anything to WordPress, it helps to switch on the AI agent that will answer your WhatsApp messages. You’ll need the WhatsApp Business app on your phone, which is different from the regular WhatsApp app. Open the WhatsApp Business app and tap the ‘Tools’ tab. Look for the option called ‘Your Business AI’ and tap it to start the guided setup. From there, WhatsApp walks you through training the agent. You’ll add your business details, connect a product catalog if you have one, and upload a short FAQ covering things like your hours, shipping, and return policy. You’ll also set your handoff rules, which decide when a chat should be passed to a real person. I recommend keeping these generous at first so that customers can always reach a human easily. There are also a few rules Meta requires you to follow: Your AI has to identify itself as an assistant. It can only handle business tasks (not open-ended chat). Customers must be able to request a human at any time. Note: Meta’s Business AI is rolling out in stages, so you may not see ‘Your Business AI’ in your Tools tab yet. Don’t worry! Until you get access, you can rely on WPChat‘s smart search, which helps your users find the relevant answer based on their intent. Plus, its smart FAQ system helps customers get instant solutions to common queries. Go ahead and complete the rest of this guide and have a working chat widget on your WordPress site. You can turn on the Meta handoff once it reaches your account. Once your agent is active, any message sent to your WhatsApp Business phone number can be answered automatically. Next, let’s give your website visitors a way to start that conversation. Step 2: Install and Activate WPChat WPChat is the plugin that connects your WordPress site to WhatsApp. It’s made by Smash Balloon, the team behind some of the most popular social media plugins for WordPress, so it’s built to be beginner-friendly. First, you’ll need to install and activate the WPChat plugin. If you need help with this step, see our guide on how to install a WordPress plugin. Note: The free version of WPChat is enough to add a WhatsApp chat widget and a basic FAQ to your site. You only need a paid plan for AI-powered Smart Search, chat funnels, extra agents, and advanced page targeting, which I’ll point out as we go. Step 3: Connect Your WhatsApp Business Number After activating the plugin, you’ll see a new WPChat menu in your WordPress sidebar. Click it, then click the ‘Set Up’ button to start the onboarding wizard. The first thing it asks for is your phone number. Enter the same WhatsApp Business number you used in Step 1, since this is where your visitors’ messages will land. Have your phone nearby in case you’re asked to verify the number by