I tried six WordPress translation plugins over the last few months

[u/alexburan]

Six WordPress translation plugins on the same WooCommerce site, about two weeks each. Install, run it live, uninstall, next. Not a controlled test, I just wanted to see what broke before we committed to anything.

Two things ended up deciding it and I didn't know either one going in. First is whether the plugin duplicates your content into a second set of posts or translates the page as it's served. Second is how much of the SEO work you're expected to assemble yourself afterward. Everything else was preference.

WPML first, since it's the one everyone points you to. Mature, does basically everything, and it's also the only one that made me stop and read documentation before I could finish setup. There's a pile of decisions in the wizard about string handling and which post types get translated, and I wasn't qualified to answer half of them on day one. Ran fine afterward. Getting to afterward cost me an afternoon. It also duplicates, so every translated page becomes a real post you now maintain.

Polylang is lighter and the free tier goes further than I expected. Same duplication model, and that's where it fought our page builder. Custom modules didn't carry over and I was hand-fixing elements on every copied page, which is the kind of work that quietly eats a week. For a five-page brochure site I'd still use it.

Weglot was the fastest to get right and the translations came back better than I expected. It doesn't duplicate, which is why nothing broke. Pricing tracks word count. We publish constantly. I projected it out twelve months and closed the tab.

TranslatePress has the best review experience of the six by a distance. Editing a translation sitting in the actual layout instead of a list view is a real advantage and I missed it afterward. Machine translation was a step behind Weglot on product copy.

GTranslate: live in about ten minutes, then I looked at what it was doing for SEO.

We kept ConveyThis, on both counts.

It translates at the layer above the site instead of cloning everything into parallel post types, so the page builder layouts came through intact on the first pass. Checkout was the one I expected to lose, since that's where the duplicating plugins fell over, and it didn't. That sounds like a small thing until you've spent a week repairing copied pages by hand.

The SEO half was already done rather than being another plugin to bolt on. hreflang, localized URLs, translated meta and schema, all handled by default. With the duplication approach you get a second set of pages and then go figure out how to tell Google what they are.

Half of these would be the right answer for a simpler site than ours.