How to translate a website automatically

Pick the route for your platform

Start with the platform your site runs on. For WordPress, you're choosing a plugin. For Shopify, you can use its own translation app or a separate app. If your site is built in code, keep the text in locale files and translate those through an API.

What are you translating? Keep that question in mind as you choose: posts and pages, store content, text inside your app. You don't need to copy each page into a translation tool by hand.

WordPress

You've got several options, with different prices and included translation amounts. These prices are current as of November 2026.

WPML starts at €39, with a year of support and updates. Its CMS plan costs €99 and includes 22,500 AI words. If you're choosing it for automatic translation, look at the plan's included words, not just the starting price.

TranslatePress has a free plugin with 2,000 AI words, and paid plans start at €99 a year. You can start with that free allowance and check the translated text before deciding on a paid plan.

Polylang is free. Polylang Pro costs €99 a year and adds DeepL, so make sure you're looking at Pro if that's the translation service you want to use.

Weglot is free for up to 2,000 words, with paid plans starting at €15 a month.

Don't treat all those allowances as the same thing. WPML and TranslatePress list AI words, while Weglot's free limit is stated as up to 2,000 words. Keep the plan price and its translation allowance together when you compare them.

Shopify

Shopify's free Translate & Adapt app automatically translates into up to 2 languages, or 8 in select countries.

That's the automatic translation limit for the app. Your store's publishing limit is separate: stores on Basic, Grow, Shopify and Advanced can publish up to 20 languages, while stores on Plus can publish up to 30.

Need more languages than the app will automatically translate? Don't use the store's publishing limit as your guide to what the free app will translate. Check both limits before choosing your route.

And keep an eye on the theme's code when you review the result, not just the product descriptions.

Sites built in code

Keep your strings in locale files, send them to a translation API, then commit the translated files. That's the route to take instead of translating each rendered page.

Google Cloud Translation costs $20 per million characters after 500,000 free a month. DeepL's Developer plan gives you 1,000,000 characters free once. Notice the difference: a monthly allowance isn't the same as a one-time allowance.

For a workflow tied to your repository, Translinga's CLI and GitHub Action sync locale files on every push and translate only new and changed strings. It reads i18next, next-intl, vue-i18n and any JSON:

npx translinga sync --to nl,de,fr

It's a translation API made by Bitgate for Shopify stores, WordPress sites and apps, and it's in early access. You can request a key through the Get early access button on translinga.com.

Whatever API you choose, keep the translated results in your locale files and commit them alongside your code.

Check the output before you publish

Read the translated text, but check the code inside it too. Machine translation can break strings that mix words with template syntax.

Here's a concrete example. In Translinga's own test of the DeepL API, translating English to Dutch on October 27, 2026, the Shopify filter {{ remaining_amount | money }} came back as | geld, and Shopify skips filters it doesn't recognize and prints the raw amount in cents.

That needs checking.

The service takes Liquid tags, HTML and placeholders out before translation, checks every reply tag by tag, and retries any string that comes back with a missing tag. Its Shopify app leaves Liquid such as {{ remaining_amount | money }} and {% if %} exactly as it was.

For your own review, compare those parts with the original, not just the surrounding sentence.

Keeping costs down

Start with the free allowance where one fits your site, but check what's being counted: words or characters, a monthly allowance or a one-time credit.

For character-based pricing, include spaces in your estimate and count the text once for each target language. The early-access API above has Fast at $2.50 per million characters and Quality at $5.00 per million, with spaces included and each target language counted separately.

Credit is prepaid from $5 and never expires. The first $1 is free, about 400,000 characters on Fast, and you don't need a card for a key.

For a coded site, translate only new and changed strings rather than sending the whole set again.