[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the WP Builds podcast, bringing you the latest news from the WordPress community. Welcome your hosts David Waumsley, and Nathan Wrigley.
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Shall we today's podcast, I'm talking with Dario from WPML is a translation plug-in if you've been in the WordPress space for any length of time than I imagined that you've heard of it, but the idea is that you want to take your. Global. And in order to do that, it needs to be available in a whole variety of different languages.
And that's what WPML can do for your WordPress website. So I talked to Dario today. We talk about how it works, what can be translated? What are the core features? Does it work with ACF and tool set and other plugins like that? Can you get professional translations done? Where does it go into your site?
Affect performance, the pricing, the roadmap the whole lot. We talk about it here. I would say that Dario's audio is a little bit glitchy in places. It's totally listable, but just a bit of a heads up that there was obviously some gremlin on Dario side, but it's still a very nice podcast episode. And so I hope that you enjoy it.
Hello there. Welcome to the interview section of the podcast. Today. I am joined by Dario from WPML. How are you doing?
[00:04:24] Dario Jazbec Hrvatin: Hello, Nathan. Nice to be here. I'm great.
[00:04:27] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, really good. Thank you. Now, Dario was very generous. He said you can just introduce me as Daria, but I feel that your full name ought to be said.
Would you say your full name? Largely because I'm inept and was unable to pronounce it. So what is your actual real full. Sure.
[00:04:43] Dario Jazbec Hrvatin: So I'm from gracious, it's a Slavic, a, a surname it's a Daddy-O aspects.
[00:04:49] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Thank you for that. I'm glad that you did it and not me because I didn't want to, he didn't want to butcher it.
Dario is on the podcast today. He's got many hats and one of them is the WPML hats. There's also working with tool set as well, but probably won't stray into that. We're just going to talk about WPML today. WPML if you have never heard. He's a plugin, which enables you to translate your WordPress website into multiple languages.
And we're going to explore that today. My suggestion would be go out and Google WPML and you can find the website and perhaps go and have a quick look around, see what it is that we're talking about. And then come back here and click play again. But let's begin with the most basic of questions. How long has WPML been around Dario?
Cause it feels like it's one of the, one of the older of the translation plug-ins on the WordPress side.
[00:05:44] Dario Jazbec Hrvatin: Yes. It's definitely one of the oldest, not, I wouldn't say the oldest, but I think it's something I could 10 years probably. I don't know exactly, but something like that because we started as a, like a free.
And then later we added the
[00:06:05] Nathan Wrigley: premium. Yeah. Okay. So it's been around a very long time. And that to me is a, is always a good measure of something. It doesn't necessarily always equate to quality, but if you've been around for a very long time doing the same thing for many years, then at least you've got heritage and that it's a profitable company, which is going to be here in a few years time as well.
Let's get to, let's get some different questions though. The, one of the things that I wanted to ask you is, I didn't know. And I don't know if you'll have an answer to this, but I was curious as to whether translating your website, as far as you're aware, might be mandatory. In other words, you have to do it.
Obviously if I'm in the UK, there's a compulsion for me to obey all sorts of guidelines around what the website content should be like in terms of accessibility and what have you. But I don't know that there's a language component. I don't think that if I put a website. And it has to be in English and another, but I was wondering if there were some jurisdictions where it was compulsory or mandatory, if you knew anything around that.
[00:07:11] Dario Jazbec Hrvatin: That's a very interesting question. I'm not sure, but from like of the top of my head, like I do know that some I think even in Croatia where I'm originally from, I'm not living in Slovenia. I think that for some Public websites. You definitely need to be in the like local language.
And also for some, I think business businesses, so let's say, I think it's an interesting question for today's world, because you could have like a. You could live in, I don't know, some other country, which doesn't speak English by default, for example. And you have a startup, okay.
You are online, it's everything in the cloud and you offer some services to the whole world, so naturally as a developer, as a. Person, you start in English of course, because it's like for the whole war world, and I think some jurisdictions do tell you, so if you're like a property like a business that, and you have a website, I think you at least need to have some sort of.
Local language version. Yeah. I don't know
[00:08:29] Nathan Wrigley: where exactly. It's interesting because it did bring to mind actually, a couple of things. First thing is I'm sure that if you are doing something for the government in this country, let's say for example, it would be, oh, I don't know some sort of medical website or something to do with taxation.
And it is literally for the government. I think there would be a compulsion. I think you would have to have the bare minimum English. And it's probably something else on there, but it just brought to mind, perhaps somewhere like Canada, where there are two official languages, you've got French and you've got English.
I, my assumption in Canada would be that maybe everything, literally everything has to be in both languages because the population is speaking those two languages in different parts. Yeah. Anyway, it was just a sort of curious aside really, but we don't need to dwell on that. With the. With the interface of WPML obviously it's going to be hard to describe it because you're going to be doing it in words, as opposed to, a screenshot or what have you.
I was just wondering what it is that you can translate. We've got in WordPress, we've got posts and we've got pages, but then there's all sorts of other things which end up on the screen. We've got headers and footers and menus. We might have custom postdocs with custom fields and all of these kinds of things.
And I was wonder, All of this was translatable just within the plugins interface.
[00:09:52] Dario Jazbec Hrvatin: Yes. And yes. Like I'm like, so my I'm a content manager for us, so I write a lot of documentation. So I'll try to use the words as, as best as possible, but you did a very good summary of what. You can translate.
Like I, because we also have a lot of experience naturally with with working with translation services, and we understand different. Approaches to translate to station. I would always separate two things. There is the content, on your site, on your WordPress site, the content is a post, the post body and its title.
And then of course your regular. WordPress pages. And then you can have like custom posts, right? You can have like portfolios or Africa as questions, whatever it is, but it's still a post in WordPress, right? It's in the database as a post, essentially. So that's one thing. That's the content your site.
This is what you're right. This is what you know, and then there are different little texts all across your site, which come from different places. So one place would be your. Because you could have a team specific for your niche. So maybe you're a restaurant, so there will be something in your team that mentions menus and like eating menus and things like like recipes, whatever, so these strings come from your team and you need to translate them.
They're separate from your content, separate from your content. And then you can have menus, which you want to translate, and then you can have widgets, all of these things. Separate from your main content from your posts and pages, but you need to translate them. And of course, with WPML you can translate everything.
[00:11:55] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So you literally can translate all the bits and pieces. So for example, you can obviously do the content. That would be the main one that everybody would be worried about in terms of, whether that's a page or a post, you can certainly modify that. I can imagine the plugin has absolutely no purpose if you couldn't do at least that bit, but you can also.
Translate strings from custom post types of plugins, like ACF or tool set or whatever it might be. And what about things like metadata can let's think about the media library, for example, we might like to translate the description of an image or something like that. All of that can be handled in the interface.
[00:12:34] Dario Jazbec Hrvatin: Yes. That's a good question. Because images are like specific because you cannot, of course you can translate as you said, descriptions and like captions stuff like this, but we also allow you we have a little add on which is, which comes with your account anyway. That allows you to track.
Images. So let's say you have an image in English, but it has some texts on it, on the photograph, huh. And then, or maybe it's your user interface that you're showing in English and then this image needs to be in other English. In other language it needs to be also the photo or the screenshot needs to be in, in another language.
So you can say okay, for French, I want to use this image, so also the image. Basically different for different languages.
[00:13:24] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I really, I hadn't even thought about that. So an example might be, like a shop or something like that, where you've got an image of a shoe or something, and it's 20% off.
That 20% off would be obviously different than another language. So you can basically replace an image in the same way that you replace text. You can say swap that image. Is it constrained to images? Can you do things like, I don't know, show a different video. Instead of the English version of the video kind of show the French version or the Italian version or whatever it might be.
[00:13:55] Dario Jazbec Hrvatin: That's a good question. I didn't test that, but so with this kind of, to show different videos you mean in a page?
[00:14:05] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So I guess it comes that would just simply come to content, right? You would just
[00:14:10] Dario Jazbec Hrvatin: say that's different. In this case you would need to. It depends on who's translating.
If you're translating you, you would just put another in the editor. You can just put another link, so it's doable. Okay.
[00:14:25] Nathan Wrigley: But yeah okay. So basically what we're saying is pretty much everything is translatable from post pages, menus, custom post types, anything you can imagine it's basically translatable.
So next thing from the. Point of view me the website owner, how do I actually do this kind of stuff? What does it look like? And I know that's going to be difficult to explain, but if I log into my WordPress website, w we may be need to we're at that point where a lot of people are moving over to the new editor, but there are some people who are sticking to the old editor.
And I don't know if that causes a difficulty, maybe you've got one interface for the Gutenberg editor and another interface for the old classic editor, but how. Interact. And then of course we've got page builders. How does all of this work w where do we actually go? What buttons are we pressing?
And all of that good. Okay. So
[00:15:16] Dario Jazbec Hrvatin: I think it's actually simple because we don't make a difference between what type of quantity it is. How it was created, for us I'm talking for us as a plugin service, they're all, it's all just texts. Okay. So all we need to do our developers need to make sure is that don't mail w which texts are in your content, so it doesn't matter for us, if it's a built with Elementor or Gutenberg, it's fine.
So all we get out is sentences strings, this kind of like words, this is what we get. And then our just later, I'm sorry. Editor doesn't care, essentially, it just it's just text for it. We now have a it's called advanced restriction editor, which is essentially It's it's in a cloud.
So it's connected directly with direct mail, but it doesn't go on inside your site. It's at your WPML plug-in, it's a, you're taken to like a cloud service, which is called advanced efficient editor. And you have the. On one side and the translate on the other. Okay. So it's just like image of sentences and it's the cash tools.
I don't know if you know what cats do this. It's the tools that professionals use to translate, but this is like a simplified one, so it's really simple to use. Everyone can use it and it's really clear. So you can even, you have a button to automatically translate for example, and then it just populates your sentences.
And you can add. For example, or you can add the word steer blustery and so on. Okay. So it's a, it's very simple. Sorry. Did
[00:17:06] Nathan Wrigley: I answer your I'm going to drill down a little bit. In a blog post, that would be fairly straightforward because you've got the, you've got the head of the footprint.
Just basically got some texts and a few images thrown in the, but the text is easy to edit now, do you break it down? So let's say I've written a 10,000 word masterpiece. It's huge and long. Do you treat that 10,000 word masterpiece as one piece of content that you edit in your cloud editor?
Or is it broken up into I dunno, can you break it up into smaller sections and tackle a bit one day and another bit another day and so on? Or is it just one big.
[00:17:45] Dario Jazbec Hrvatin: Okay sorry. In our old editor, which is we call it classic editor bits, like a post body would be one one field, like one text to edit.
But now with advanced transition editor, which is a default one for some time and it's really easy to use, it's really more advanced. All the texts is broken down into pieces. Okay. Each sentence is its own string and you see it in its own line. Okay. So this is great because it it allows you to concentrate on each.
Part of your texts separately. However if you use automatic translation, the, we we don't like, I don't know how to explain it. Automated translation works best if it has as much context as possible. So for example, if you send a word or like a phrase to one phrase to a translation to, to, to a machine just it's harder for the machine to know the context and how to properly translate. But if you send it to your post of 10,000 words, it said, okay, the night it has a, it has analytics that tells you what's the context of this little phrase that you want me to translate. And then it connects everything and the transition is much more natural.
Okay. Yeah. I don't
[00:19:20] Nathan Wrigley: know if this makes sense. Yeah. That's really interesting. The. Okay. So you mentioned Elementor a minute ago and the fact that it's possible to use WPML with Elementor. So imagine any page builder, beaver, builder Elementor or oxygen, whatever you'd like. Let's say that I've got a really complex layout.
I've got images over here, video over here, and I've got texts dotted around all over the place. Let's say that. I want to modify there's some texts, three, three sections down, three rows down. On my page and it's next to an image. How do I actually, how do I actually edit that? I click on it in some way.
Is there a button which then takes me to a new tab and I'm then just editing that particular
[00:20:04] Dario Jazbec Hrvatin: paragraphs? Sorry, so sorry if I wasn't a clear you don't translate a page in that way. So imagine this you're on this page. It's created, it's a. It's a design of, okay. You have, as you said, like you have images and texts and stuff, so let's say you want to translate yourself.
You click the plus button and it takes you to this translation editor, which has absolutely no design of your own. It's not like there are no images. There are no shortcodes there. Not anything just text. Okay. So if you're a pages is like a 10 images and one sentence, you will just see one sentence. And that's all you translate the sentence and when you save it w mail, when you visit an another language, which you trusted it to.
Like it makes it work. As on the original one, it combines everything like the images and everything in your, as it should be, it just puts the right language. Got
[00:21:03] Nathan Wrigley: it. I probably wasn't listening hard enough there, but I totally get it now. Thank you for that. The, from a technological point of view.
How is it substituting one thing for another? So let's say for example, I'm browsing the website and I'm in English and there it isn't good. And then I click on the option to see it in French or German, or what have you what is the technology that's going on in the background to pull the English one and substitute it with the translated.
[00:21:33] Dario Jazbec Hrvatin: Oh, okay. I don't know these kind of details as I D I'm not a developer but I think, I don't know, honestly, I don't want to give a wrong answer. Okay. But essentially I think from both, I understand it's like the same page. Not just the changes, like it's in your database anyway.
[00:22:00] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So it's not like we're going to a separate page, which is just the German page.
It's the same page, but the content has been pulled out and substituted. Maybe there's something I'm guessing. There's probably. Something in the URL or something like that, like a parameter, like Eng for English or something anyway, but, okay. So it's the exact same page. So confident that if you send somebody to the URL of the original page, they will get to the right place and then they can translate it.
Whereas it might be a struggle if they if they were to land on the German version. And that was a completely different URL to the English version. That's good to know. Okay. The next question then is really tell us a little bit about some of good stuff in there. Some of the things that you think are quite exciting, perhaps features that you believe set you apart.
It's WordPress. There's always more than one solution for just about everything. And you've got some rival competition in the marketplace. What is it that you feel sets WPML apart? What are the one, two, or maybe three things that you think actually do this.
[00:23:10] Dario Jazbec Hrvatin: Okay. So I it's a hard question because, I'm obviously biased.
So I I liked so many things about it, but I'll try to be short. So I think like one of the best thing that we we touched upon this at the beginning so that you can really not only translate the whole site, but you can translate it. I, on your own terms. Okay. So you can do it through.
You can send it to someone else in your site. Let's say you have a friend who is a trend or like translator, create them a user in our site and send them to do the translations. And then you can use a translation service, which is we have a, like a around 100 to integrated translation services from all around the world.
So you can send it to professional. They do the translation, send it back to your site, that's it. You just pay and you're done, and finally you now have it with a 4.5, which is, which was recently released. You can use, you can just say to WNL you can translate my whole site automatically.
And I'll just do the reviews if I want. Or if you don't want to do the reviews, you can, we'll leave it as it is. So I think this kind of full features is like something I'm not sure. Others have, it's like really, like you have freedom to do translations, however want, so I think that's a big thing.
And the newest big thing I would say is automatic translation. Which as I said, just got released because a lot of people were asking for this, and there are our competitors, not all of them, but some of them do have automatic translation, but Some cases. I know that they don't save these translations in your, into your database, but it's somehow in their cloud or something like this.
So I don't know the technical details, but we don't do this. So WML like you own your translations. Okay. Once you do them in any way, if it's an automatic translation or professional service, or you do it yourself, it's in your database. Okay. And you can do it. We did whatever you want. If you want to switch to another.
A solution, you can even export everything and import it again. And, I think that's pretty cool. But just one final tip is just to say like that automatic translation is becoming really incredible and it's not because I don't know if you noticed this, but I remember a moment when I went to this site, which is about art.
They share like a great photographs and paintings and stuff like this. And I was reading and it's in French. It's a French site, and I'm reading it on my mobile and it's I really want to read this text. The images are great. I want to know about this artists, And I see that okay, wait, I it's I'm in Chrome so I can translate it.
So I use automatic translation and it's from French to English obviously. And it's incredible. It was like I understood. It was not just that I understood everything, but everything was like really spot on. Like the translation was incredible. And this was two years ago, like when this happened. So today in direct mail, you have you can choose from Google translate.
You can use a mic, Microsoft. To Slater or you can use Depot and Depot is I think it's algorithms or top of the, industry and it's incredible what these these things do, but they're not perfect. Of course, so as I mentioned earlier, sometimes things go out of context.
You could have a button that says something like, I don't know, save or upload, and in different languages, you could say this in different ways. It can be like a an action or it can be a noun. So this is where you would like to have someone to look at it like someone human.
And this is where actually a professional term translators are still crucial. So we allow you to invite anyone as a professional translator, go in, check automatic translation and do it. And I actually talked to some of our translators that we know, and the. They are not like scared of it, would say oh my God, we're all losing our jobs because Google will translate everything.
It's not true. Because as I said there are like technical documents, legal document, special niche that, it's not easy to translate, especially for a machine. And then they understand that it's not, it won't take their jobs away, but automatic translation. Allowed them to do more stuff quickly.
Yeah. So you just go in, it's translated. Okay. I'm a translator. I will not write. It's readable for humans and it's culturally and contextually. It makes sense. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:28:28] Nathan Wrigley: I think you're right. I'm always astonished by the S the rate of development of AI around language in particular.
I I use an AI script to, to turn my, this audio. In fact, this audio work. We'll be put through an AI algorithm and out it comes on the other side it is remarkably clever. And so I would imagine, obviously I'd imagine the job of going from audio to text is more difficult because there's accents and, mispronunciation or.
Dialects. And what have you, whereas you've got to imagine that over time, certain phrases and certain translations from one language to another, eventually that job of work will be largely complete because we've pretty much done every possible combination over the years. We've translated all these things to all these other things.
Yeah, that's really interesting, but I do the fact that you've still got in there, the option to send this away to a actual human being who can then go and check it and, do the perfect translation? How what's the costing of that? Obviously the costing of the human being I'm guessing will be significantly more, but even the sort of Google and you mentioned deep L and all of these kinds of things, do you have any insight into what they cost?
Let's say for a thousand words, I don't know if it's measuring.
[00:29:52] Dario Jazbec Hrvatin: Okay. Now you got me. Wait so I kinda, it's let me think and give you a proper answer. It's like a. This is actually like some people complain about this when you create like paid let's say Depot, this like construction service.
Not translation service, the automatic translation machine translation service. It's different if you do it like on a personal basis. You Nathan go in and take an account, and it's different for us who worked through their APIs and stuff, so that's one thing. And we, it's related to the amount of words, the most.
Words you spend, the more, more you need the better the pricing. Okay. I don't know if that makes sense. Yeah. So I can tell you just we have it on our, we have obviously we have a page where we talk about pricing for automatic translation. So I can just tell you that something like.
But let's go hide. Okay. Let's go really high. And if you currently, if you spend up to 500,000 credits and I would spend credits in a second, that's 70 bucks, and that's a lot of words, I dunno if that
[00:31:28] Nathan Wrigley: makes sense. I don't quite know what a credit equates to reset.
[00:31:32] Dario Jazbec Hrvatin: Okay. So credit depends on the service.
One credit is one word for Microsoft Azure. Okay. And then it goes up like I think Google is three credits and Deepal is five because they are more expensive know. Yep. But anyway, like 500,000 credits. For 70 bucks that like, usually, like that's more than like usually yeah.
I'm
[00:32:05] Nathan Wrigley: with you. So on the D on the Azure side, 500,000 credits literally equals 500,000 words on the DPL side. It'd be a hundred thousand words and Google is 200,000. Yeah. It's a lot. It's a large amount. And so is that D is that chargeable directly? Do I pay WPML for that? And you get a better pricing because you're doing things on, in volume or.
Combined do I just link my API keys with my deep Alica?
[00:32:32] Dario Jazbec Hrvatin: That's the thing. You cannot link it because they don't allow it. But you can sell with us. You can choose what to we have this like a pay as you go account. So it's essentially we charge. Okay. But the thing is we don't charge you anything if you don't spend anything.
Okay. Because so it's not like a subscription it's subscription. There's no a monthly fee. There's no such thing. So if you translate your site let's say this month, you have everything sorted out and you don't translate for another year, that's it you paid it and there's no charges to your account.
And then in. The half a year, you say, okay I need to change my pages a bit. And then you translate more and you just pay for what? You
[00:33:21] Nathan Wrigley: just got it. Got it. Okay. That makes.
[00:33:24] Dario Jazbec Hrvatin: And sorry, besides this, you can also buy like a bulk of credits, like you say I don't want this like kind of a, an account, I'll just buy I don't know 200,000 credits and that's I don't know, 100 and something bucks.
Okay. And then these credits don't expire. You have a demeaning account and you use them, how whenever you're. So that's like a prepaid model I presume. Yeah, that
[00:33:51] Nathan Wrigley: makes sense. Okay. Yeah. That's great. Thank you. I'd really into the whole AI thing. That's fascinating. So WordPress has been changing quite a lot.
We've we've had Gutenberg introduced, which has becoming more and more used. I'm just wondering if if there's anything on the WPML side, which relates to Gutenberg in particular, do you know if you're writing your text in Gutenberg? Is it the exact same process that you mentioned before? Are there any kind of blocks that you have or anything around the new block editor that we might need to know about?
[00:34:24] Dario Jazbec Hrvatin: I, to be honest, like we always make sure that we follow. The word press is lead in general, so as soon as it became, known that Gutenberg is coming, we were on top of it, so we pay very much attention to what, the folks are doing. So everything essentially just works, we make sure that it worked from the day one, when they released Gutenberg, we released a new version and it just works with the Gutenberg. It doesn't matter. You're like what you have inside, what blocks you use it will work. You can translate it easily. And we do have wait, we have a widget for I think for the.
There's like a, so you can like there's something supplemental wages for widgets and like for the link, which switcher, if I remember correctly, so not like we don't need like a lot.
[00:35:29] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Everything's being handled on the sort of cloud side, then you probably don't. But yeah, I was curious about things like where the little translate.
Show me this site in French button, whether there was like a widget for that or a block for that, that you could drop into the content somewhere. And that would be the location of your little flag icons. So to go from Portuguese to French or whatever it is,
[00:35:54] Dario Jazbec Hrvatin: Not at this moment. Okay. You mean like a conditional or something like yeah.
[00:35:58] Nathan Wrigley: Or just something that you could drop in, if you only translate a couple of pieces on your entire website, it might be rather than having a translate menu item, which is permanently there, but is pointless because you've only got a couple of pieces translated. If you could drop it in, like you say, contextually only onto this blog post or whatever it might.
I
[00:36:17] Dario Jazbec Hrvatin: don't think so. No, that's fine. Okay. Okay. Sorry. Okay. Just like one, I need to make one comment. So I just open it. So I told you wrongly just about this. What credits are. I told you correctly. Completely misfired on the amounts. One credit is one word for Microsoft Azure, and two credits are one word for Google and three or four people.
So it's not 1, 3, 5, but 1, 2, 3. Okay. Because I just, yeah, it's cheaper. That's why I wanted to clarify it because that's different than okay. No, that's fine.
[00:36:56] Nathan Wrigley: That's fine. Okay. Few more questions if that's all right with you now, obviously if we're swapping things dynamically based upon certain conditions, I wanna see this in French.
I want to see these in English. Then there must be some sort of hit somewhere. In terms of the low times and what have you. And I wondered if you had any insights into that, whether the team have any data as to whether it typically slows things down or how performance it is basically.
[00:37:23] Dario Jazbec Hrvatin: Yeah. There are two things here I would mention now that you mentioned all of these, I actually can better answer your previous question about how it all works. If you remember, I don't know if you remember. It's one of the plugins that used to be popular for translation. So a, it used to work like this, that you have a post and then you have translations and all of these translations are saved inside your the same post, it's just like there, they were like separated w with WPML you don't have this, so you have a.
Essentially you have you have a post, you translated that translation is another post. Okay. And what a double family needs to do is connect between these two, right? So this is why we have some custom, database tables where we say okay, this book, this English post is translated into this post.
So essentially your translation post is. Just as we said before, it's it ha it uses the correct language, right? It's not English anymore, but maybe it's German or Spanish or Portuguese, whatever. But it's compiled it's in the same so if it's created by a page builder it's built through their modules and widgets or whatever, so it's the same.
So the loading time does not wait for double mill to insert anything, it's essentially the same page just with different language. The same design with the different content language wise. The performance there is. There is we all know, like every plugin basically plugging your activate.
It takes like a tiny fraction of the performance, but that's not, there are no hits here that would be significant. The other part of this is translations coming from, the ammo files usually come with like plugins and themes. We used to, like a few years ago, we used to have a problem with this because of the way we were loading them and storing them.
So now we are basically, we changed this completely and this was the only like performance. Snack that we hit along the road, which is now obsolete. I think it's already been two years, at least that we fixed this. And of course, as I said, every pricing adds a bit, but it's definitely it's not nothing that I don't know how to explain.
Like it's. It's not significant. Yeah. No. Okay. And I actually I don't know if you could Google this or if anyone listening to this would be interested in so we when this whole I think about Google and performance start. Yeah. When they said your site needs to be faster.
So that's went quiet for a while. But when all of this stuff. We were very interested in the topic and we're still, we still are because, essentially we do think that sites should be, fast and they should be responsive. I did a video for this w it was, it's like a, I think, 15 to 20 minutes video where I said okay, let's build a WooCommerce.
With double female, so translate it of course and see how it impacts performance. Okay. So I did this and I did the step by step and it's in the video and the, it stayed in the green. Okay. So we activated WooCommerce, it stayed in the green, then we have to mail it, send to the green something.
We built a whole store and it was still green in the, the page insights page. And that was eye opening. And we keep a
[00:41:34] Nathan Wrigley: very close eye on, I mean that, because that's a big concern these days, isn't it. We call web vitals and all of that. People want to be sure that, and obviously if you are rendering different content than.
Potentially a real downfall. So it's good to know that you've been thinking about that. Okay. We're we're fast moving into the latter part of this. So let's get onto some nitty gritty stuff. Firstly, let's talk about pricing. You probably just want to tell us about the different price brackets.
W we've obviously we've discussed the sort of pricing for the actual translation. So I'm talking more about the license for the plugin itself. What what's the pricing as of this day? So it's
[00:42:14] Dario Jazbec Hrvatin: quite straightforward. We have like yearly subscriptions and there are like three additions.
So you can get a multi-lingual blog for $39. You can get a multilingual CMS. That's the regular most popular Account type for $99. And if you're like an agency that builds, like multiple sites for multiple clients, we have a, an account for you, which is $199 per year. So this is yearly.
And do you want me to quickly just tell you the date?
[00:42:50] Nathan Wrigley: Please.
[00:42:51] Dario Jazbec Hrvatin: Okay. So the 1990, the most regular one, like multilingual CMS, which most people get is it gets you like a, you can use it on three sites, three different sites, but you also get like you, you need to register registered developmental obviously, but you get like a development, registration keys as well, so you don't need to worry about using. Key on a development site, you'll get additional ones and you can just use that for development. And then when you go to production, you just use your one of three quick keys and a multilingual agency. Obviously, if you're an agency, you can just have as many sites as.
[00:43:31] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So the $99 one gets you three sites. The multi-agency one at 1 9, 9 that's you can put that on as many as you I get it. And
[00:43:41] Dario Jazbec Hrvatin: for these two, you get all of the features. So all of our add-on plug-ins everything is. Okay. And this is what differentiates it from the multilingual block, which is meant as it, as the name says block, it's meant for like simple sites.
So in this case, you do the translation yourself. So there is no managing of translation and sending it to others or automatic translation and the, So basically it's just like you translating your posts and pages. That's what it comes down to. Okay. So I think this is important.
Because we were talking about automatic translation. We, before we published released our, this like bigger 4.5 release of document, which introduced the whole automatic translation to our clients we had a research and we went to see Of our clients. And we have a more than million installs, we checked their sites.
And we wanted to see what is an average number of words that sites have, what they need to translate. And we extrapolated a free credits for them. So when you buy it, for example, CMS for $99, you get 90,000 free credits with that, so this actually, we we, our research shows the district cover something like 80% of our clients sites, that would just like mostly translate the whole site.
No. So besides getting the plugging, you get this 90,000 free credits and you can also automatically translate.
[00:45:29] Nathan Wrigley: Got it. Yeah. So in the $99, yeah. 90,000 free credits. And in the 1 9, 9 daily agency one, you get 180,000. So double, double the amount. Got it. Got it. Okay. That's great. Okay. Yeah.
So last couple of questions then first one is around the roadmap in the future. Have you got any insights into that? Is there anything that's being developed currently that you're excited about that you can talk.
[00:45:52] Dario Jazbec Hrvatin: Okay. So this was a huge release, and we do S I don't know if you know this, but we do staged a rollout.
So this means that we don't like, just push the button and everyone gets this version and they can update, but we, start with a 1% of the clients and 10% and so on, because as we have so many clients we automatically we do we check the. Gets broken on the way, so any red flags, we would just stop it and fix it and, go on.
There were absolutely no red flags, everything looks fine so far. So we are slowly rolling it out to everyone. Not yet. We are, I think on 10%. Okay. So we are still in this cycle. Okay. Plan is to basically we're gathering as we go. We are talking to our clients, who switched to things like automated to translation.
If there is anything that is bothering them or they found something or they have, they often have great requests like, okay, I really like this, but it could, it would be even better if you added, this and this. So we are listening to this now and the. This will be the basis of the next, I would say bigger released, but for six, which is planned, I think, I don't know.
I cannot say this. I'm not, I don't leave. I don't leave the leader either lead the development team. So I cannot say that. But the plan is to work on this Polish out, any performance things usability issues that clients raise, like to really Polish, everything that we can and then, okay.
Another cycle would be more related to
[00:47:42] Nathan Wrigley: features. Okay. Okay. Thank you. And the very last question I've got for you is many people will know this the sort of future of the plugin because in a future release of WordPress, and we obviously can't put our finger on exactly when that will be, but at some point in the next few years the capability to do the translations natively within word.
It has been tabled. So it's going to come at some point. And I was just wondering if you had any thoughts on that. We had the same sort of debate around WordPress and page builders when Gutenberg came around and there was lots of people saying it looks like the time for page builders is up at the moment.
Seems like the page builder industries is thriving and just the same way that it hasn't good. And bug really didn't seem to take too much of a chunk out of that at this point. And so wondering if you've got the same thoughts, you be leaching away your clients to people using a core feature, or do you still believe that you've got a a possibility of surviving long into the future, even with translations handled?
[00:48:47] Dario Jazbec Hrvatin: That's a natural question to ask, and we've been on this topic, since it was announced. And as you said, like there's very little information, even the developers that work in core that contribute to core, they don't know exactly at all. What, like what the plan is.
Okay. And all the features that I. Previously a set that we have, it's hard to imagine this being developed anytime soon. Okay. So I think it will, as you said, it will be very similar to page builders, I'm sure there'll be some people, let's say, okay. Let's say something simple happens to me, they allow you to translate manually your posts and pages starters, I'm sure there'll be. A few people that this is perfectly fine forum. They will go for it, but I don't think, I think it will, it can happen. It definitely can happen if you give let's say, I don't know. Some million dollars and you form a team and, or maybe pay some, a startup to do it for you.
You could do this it's possible, but still even all of these today's top translation plugins. It took them time to come here and it, it takes a lot of understanding of the translation business, I think, itself. So I don't know. I don't know. I'm not I'm not too worried for us at this moment because it will take time and the.
If we take Gutenberg as a, as an example, I like Gutenberg, I really liked now doing posts in it, but, and we are our toasted plugins. They work very nicely with Gutenberg. I don't know if you use them, but the full site editing even the one that's planned for, to come like at the end of this year, it's it's not nearly.
Close to what the page people the builders are doing at this moment. So I dunno. Yeah. Now I understand you have the words. I'm not too worried
[00:50:59] Nathan Wrigley: about I get it because obviously you've got you can imagine the options available in WordPress will be fairly minimal, shall we say, compared to a full.
Plug in, like you've got with all of the different options that we've just discussed. Yeah. Okay. That would interesting to know Dario. I think we've come to the end of our time. I appreciate you spending time with us today. Talking about WPML in terms of being able to reach you or a Twitter handle, an email, or maybe just a URL, what's the best place to contact you if people wish to.
Oh,
[00:51:32] Dario Jazbec Hrvatin: okay. You can find me I think on LinkedIn, is this something. I, if you search for my name there, you'll find me. And I have it like notified. I've been notified immediately and I'll be happy to, and straight any questions or like just drop me a line and I'll be happy to talk.
[00:51:51] Nathan Wrigley: You'll obviously be able to copy and paste Dario's name from the show notes.
So Dario really appreciate you coming on the podcast today. Thank you very much.
[00:52:01] Dario Jazbec Hrvatin: Thanks a lot. Neat. And it was great to be here with you.
[00:52:04] Nathan Wrigley: I hope that you enjoyed that lovely having Dario on the podcast today to talk all about internationalization of your website with the WPML plug-in you can find that episode.
It's number 270 on the WP Builds websites. WP Builds.com. Don't forget, we'll be back next Thursday because. Every two weeks, we swap between a chat with David Wamsley and I, and an interview. This was an interview. So next week we will have a chat with David Walmsley and I in our WordPress business bootcamp series.
We're on series two now, but join us for that. If you don't manage to do that, then maybe join us. Live 2:00 PM. UK time. WP Builds.com forward slash live for our this week in WordPress show, the WP Builds podcast was brought to you today. By Cloudways, Cloudways provides the ultimate managed WordPress and WooCommerce hosting solutions.
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Okay. We're done for this week. I hope that you stay safe and have a good week. I'm going to fade in some cheesy music and say, bye-bye.
