WPML review: Ultimate test of the plugin to make WordPress multilingual

A second job. For a long time, creating and managing a multilingual WordPress site often meant doing the same work twice.

Once you’d written a piece of content, you had to translate it. Then you had to check each version, apply the updates, and keep an eye on menus, widgets, WooCommerce products, and so on.

Warning: burnout risk! And once things settled down, here we go again. You had to start over a few days (or hours) later, as soon as a piece of content changed, even slightly.

What if those days were finally behind us? With the arrival of WPML 5.0, one of the most significant updates in its history, the well-known multilingual plugin is shifting gears and changing its philosophy.

The goal is no longer just to translate your site, but to automate almost all of your multilingual management.

To put it simply and whet your appetite a little: you set up the plugin once, choose your translation preferences, then simply keep publishing your content. The rest? WPML takes care of it.

This shift in paradigm definitely called for a major update to our article. So we took the opportunity to get our hands dirty again and put this new version through an in-depth test.

Does it really live up to its promises, and what major changes does it bring? You’ll find out after reading our full analysis and review on the topic.

Transparency note: This page is sponsored. This allows us to support the research and writing work of the blog’s writers. That said, we remain impartial. If a product isn’t worth it, we’ll say so (or we simply won’t cover it).

Originally written in October 2021, this article was last updated in September 2026, on the occasion of the release of WPML version 5.0.

What is WPML?

WPML, short for WordPress Multilingual Plugin, is a premium plugin that automatically turns a single-language WordPress site into a multilingual one.

Where some solutions limit themselves to translating posts and pages, WPML takes a much more comprehensive approach.

“Powerful enough for enterprise sites, yet simple enough for blogs,” its homepage states. Of course, the plugin can translate your editorial content (posts, pages).

Those are the basics, you might say. But it goes much further by also handling the translation of every element that makes up your WordPress site: menus, media, custom post types, categories and other taxonomies, WooCommerce products, text from your plugins and themes, and so on.

As we explain in our article on creating a multilingual WordPress site, WordPress doesn’t natively handle multilingual support.
WPML fills that gap by integrating directly into your admin interface, without adding any extra technical complexity for you.

This approach largely explains why WPML has established itself as a go-to name for multilingual WordPress sites for nearly twenty years.

Launched in 2007, WPML is one of the most popular WordPress plugins for building and managing multilingual sites.

According to figures published on its official site, it has won over 250,000 users running the plugin on more than 1.5 million sites.

Behind WPML is the company OnTheGoSystems, which also offers other tools such as Toolset, a plugin that lets you add custom post types, fields, and taxonomies to your WordPress site.

Since our last review, conducted in late 2021, the plugin has gone through several major updates.

However, none has been as significant as version 5.0, released in September 2026.

We’ll come back to this in detail throughout this article. As a preview, here’s the guiding idea behind this new version:

You set up WPML once, then let the plugin work in the background while you focus on managing your site in your main language.

What are WPML’s main strengths?

If the multilingual plugin WPML has managed to carve out a hefty share of the market over nearly two decades, it’s because it packs in quite a few strengths, most of which are showcased on its homepage:

• translation of your entire site, as detailed above, whether by AI or manually (you handle it yourself),
• an in-house AI translation engine. PTC, WPML’s purpose-built engine, promises higher quality than generic solutions, with a results guarantee we hadn’t seen from any competitor before.
• a now-unified interface. This is one of the biggest changes in version 5.0: everything is managed from a central dashboard, which we detail further below.
• proven compatibility. WPML works with the most popular WordPress themes and plugins. It also integrates natively with the WordPress Editor (Gutenberg), as well as the main page builders on the market.
• stability, reliability, and security. “We make sure WPML is updated ahead of every WordPress update, and ahead of updates to your popular themes and plugins,” the company states.
• optimization for multilingual SEO. You can set your URL structure (subdirectories, subdomains, or separate domains per language), a sitemap per language, and the SEO meta information for translations.
• “smooth performance on WordPress sites of all sizes”,
• versatility and flexibility. WPML supports small sites as well as much more ambitious projects. You can use it for a blog, a showcase site, a WooCommerce store, a media outlet, an institutional site, or even a network of sites managed by an agency.
• human support. If you’d rather keep control over your translations, you can bring in your own translators or professional translation services connected directly to WPML.
• automatic management of XML sitemaps and hreflang tags. The latter tell search engines which language version to serve based on each visitor’s language and location.

WPML before and after version 5.0: what’s really changing?

“WPML 5.0 is the biggest update we’ve released in years.” That’s how the team behind the plugin describes version 5.0.

Having tested it, we share that assessment. As you’ll discover bit by bit, this update goes far beyond a simple interface makeover.

In fact, WPML has rethought everything from the ground up. It’s adopting a new philosophy and a new way of working.

The plugin now works on the assumption that translations should keep pace with your content, without requiring your constant intervention, as used to be the case.

The new way it works can be summed up in four steps:

1. You set up WPML once.
2. You choose which content to translate.
3. You simply keep publishing in your main language.
4. WPML automatically handles the translations and keeps them up to date.

To help you visualize the scope of this overhaul (and the change it represents), we’ve put together a summary comparison table covering the four areas that, in our view, have seen the most transformation.

At first glance, these changes may seem mostly technical.

Yet they all pursue the same goal: letting you spend more time producing content than managing your translations.

How do you install WPML on WordPress?

Good news if you’re already using WPML. Updating to version 5.0 doesn’t change your current setup. Your settings, translations, and plugins are all kept as they are. The switch to “Translate Everything Automatically” as the default mode only applies to new installations. Menus are grouped under the unified WPML menu, with automatic redirects put in place.

A simplified installation process

This simplification actually starts from the very first moments of using the plugin, with a (very) heavily reworked setup process.

Let’s recap. Before WPML 5.0, things were a bit of a mess. In your customer account, you had access to 14 plugins, with the daunting task of figuring out what each one was for.

Once you’d figured out what did what, WPML would recommend installing at least four of them, which, in its own words, “every multilingual site needs.”

With WPML 5.0, no more pulling your hair out. Only two plugins are needed:

1. WPML Multilingual CMS: the base plugin, WPML’s Core.
2. String Translation: to translate your site’s text strings, meaning the text that isn’t part of posts, pages, or taxonomies.

Overall, the setup is lighter and easier to manage than before. Aside from that, the installation process hasn’t changed.

After purchasing a license on wpml.org, download the OTGS Installer plugin:

Install it, then activate it on your WordPress site via the menu Plugins > Add New Plugin > Upload Plugin.

Enter the license key available in your customer account by clicking “Register WPML”:

WPML will then ask you to register your new site in your WPML account, which will generate a license key for you:

Next, select the plugins your site needs to become fully multilingual.

By default, it will select at least the ones we mentioned earlier: WPML Multilingual CMS and String Translation.

In our case, it also offers to install its WooCommerce add-on and a plugin to optimize multilingual SEO compatible with Yoast SEO, since both of those plugins are installed on our test site.

After checking the small “Activate after download” box, click the “Download” button:

A clear and intuitive setup wizard

Once WPML is activated, you’re invited to configure it through a setup wizard, “before you can start translating.”

To do so, click the “Configure WPML” button:

A redesigned setup wizard launches automatically. It lets you configure various translation-related settings on your WordPress site.

Step 1: Choose your site’s languages

To get started, you need to choose your site’s default language, and the languages you want to translate it into.

There’s no shortage of options, with more than 65 languages available, ranging from English to Spanish, including Welsh and Quechua.

WPML also gives you access to regional languages, such as Catalan and Galician.

If you haven’t finalized your choices yet, you can of course add or remove a language later.

For the purposes of this test, I’m choosing to translate my site into English.

Step 2: Select the URL format

Next, it’s time to choose your URL format. WPML gives you a choice among 3 options:

1. Different languages in directories. For example: mysite.com/fr/ for French and mysite.com/en/ for English.
2. A different domain per language. For example: mysite.fr for the French version and mysite.co.uk for the British version.
3. Language name added as a parameter. For example, mysite.com?lang=en for English.

Which structure you choose depends on your project and your needs. For the English version of WPMarmite, which uses the format https://wpmarmite.com/en/, Alex chose a directory-based URL structure, keeping the main domain name and adding the language code as a subdirectory.

If you choose the “Different languages in directories” option, your site’s permalink structure needs to be different from the default one (though this is probably a setting you’ll have already taken care of).

In that case, we recommend using the “Post name” setting under Settings > Permalinks.

Be careful if you decide to change your permalink structure. The idea is to do it as soon as you install WordPress. If you do it later on, you’ll need to set up redirects, since your content’s URLs will have changed format, which will lead to plenty of 404 errors for your visitors. To find out how to go about it, check out our dedicated resource.

Step 3: Register your WPML license key

Now, it’s time to register your WPML license key, a necessary step to automatically receive plugin updates, which is always a good idea, especially for security reasons. 😉

In principle, you’ve already done this, so go ahead and continue.

Step 4: Choose what you’re translating with WPML 5.0

In step 4, you choose what to translate, with two main options:

1. Automatically translate everything with PTC (Private Translation Cloud), WPML’s AI translation engine introduced in version 4.9. We’ll come back to this in a dedicated section a bit later.
2. Translate part of your content on a case-by-case basis, if you don’t need to translate your entire site.

Obviously, your choices aren’t final at this stage. You can change everything however you like afterward, in WPML’s settings.

If you’re unsure, stick with the default setup recommended by WPML 5.0 (namely, using PTC).

Step 5: AI translation

Next, add some contextual information (AI-based) about your site or brand, as well as your target audience, so PTC can translate your site while taking these elements into account.

Every sentence and every page will be translated based on this basic but essential information.

Step 6: Human translation

In step 6, in addition to AI translation, define what you’d like to translate yourself (your settings can be changed later).

You can add your own team of translators and use professional translation services.

Once you’ve completed the entire setup process, all that’s left is to apply your settings to make your site multilingual:

Once these steps are complete, you gain access to the heart of the plugin. This is where the version 5.0 overhaul truly changes the way you work, as we’ll see now.

A new, easier-to-use interface

Fewer menus, more simplicity

For a long time, the multilingual plugin was sometimes seen as comprehensive, but also fairly dense.

If you’ve ever used an older version of WPML, you probably remember an interface split across roughly a dozen submenus (Translation Management, Languages, Theme and Plugin Localization, Translations, Media Translation, etc.).

This fragmentation was one of the main criticisms we had of the plugin in our previous review.

To refresh your memory, before WPML 5.0 arrived, the main settings menu looked like this:

To translate a post, edit a translation string, or work on a WordPress menu, you sometimes had to jump from one screen to another.

To make everything much easier to digest, WPML 5.0 starts with a much cleaner menu, with its main features grouped into two submenus: “Translations” and “Settings.”

If you go into “Settings,” for example, all the options are grouped on a single page, which is much easier to read:

The “Settings” section now includes a search bar. So you no longer need to know exactly where an option is located to find it, which is a nice touch for a plugin as rich in settings as WPML.

A centralized dashboard for all translations

With version 5.0, there’s also a key word: centralize. One concrete application of this new philosophy lies in how your translations are managed.

Everything happens from a single place: the translation dashboard, accessible via WPML > Translations.

This single dashboard literally covers everything you can translate on your site:

• your posts and pages, including custom post types,
• your taxonomies (categories, tags, and custom taxonomies),
• your navigation menus,
• text strings coming from your theme or your WordPress plugins.

In practice, this means you no longer need to remember which submenu a given setting is hiding in.

A menu made up of different tabs at the top of the dashboard gives you access to everything you can translate:

Before moving on to translation, remember to add a language switcher to your site. This is done in the WPML > Settings menu, and it lets your visitors easily choose their preferred language on your site.
Using flags is often a natural first instinct. However, in practice, displaying flags isn’t necessarily a best practice. After all, a Brazilian visitor might not necessarily click on a Portuguese flag. It’s usually better to simply go with the language name.

How do you translate your entire site with WPML?

A cup of TEA, and translation direction

Before we move on, fancy a cup of TEA? Don’t worry, WPML hasn’t hijacked this article to launch into a frantic translation of our sentences.

The reason we’re talking about tea is that we’re about to pour you plenty of TEA, the acronym for Translate Everything Automatically.

Remember, we already mentioned this translation mode recommended by WPML back when we set up the plugin.

This TEA was already pretty drinkable before WPML 5.0 arrived, but it’s been improved since (no splash of milk needed ^^).

How TEA works is simple to understand: as soon as you edit existing content or publish new content in your main language, WPML translates it and updates the translations automatically, with no manual action needed on your part.

You keep writing normally in the WordPress Editor, and the translated versions follow along in the background.

The big new feature in version 5.0 concerns the direction of translation. Previously, automatic translation of the entire site only worked one way: from your default language to your secondary languages.

If you published content directly in a secondary language (e.g., French or Spanish), you had to translate it manually.

That’s no longer the case. You can now publish in Spanish, for example, and watch that content automatically propagate to French and to every other language enabled on your site.

How do you use Translate Everything Automatically to translate your content?

After that theoretical overview, let’s move on to putting it into practice. To use Translate Everything Automatically, head to the menu WPML > Translations > Dashboard.

In the “Translate everything automatically” box, click the “Set up Translate Everything” button:

Next, select the elements you want to translate (pages, posts, products, front-end strings, etc.), as well as the target translation language (e.g., English).

Before moving on, WPML gives you a summary of the estimated total cost to translate your content. That way, there are no bad surprises before you proceed!

After clicking the “Continue” button, you’ll have a choice of three options:

1. Publish without review. This is what WPML recommends: it publishes translations immediately, skipping the review process.
2. Wait for review. You approve the translation before it’s published.
3. Publish and flag for review. WPML publishes the translations immediately but flags them so you can check them whenever it suits you.

Once you’ve chosen, click the “Enable Translate Everything Automatically” button to kick off the translation:

While you wait, WPML shows you that translation is in progress:

And very quickly, just like that, here’s the result on our site’s live front end. A nice About page translated into English without any effort on our part:

In the end, the translation is very accurate and high quality. WPML’s PTC engine manages to move past word-for-word translation to produce results that are genuinely well-targeted and appropriate.
To get a closer read on PTC’s translation quality, we chose to translate the same page with DeepL.
The result turned out to be more than decent, but honestly, PTC proved more accurate for translation, with a more natural feel. WPML’s in-house engine is able to use fewer words to produce more direct sentences.
We also found that some key phrases were translated better with PTC than with DeepL.
Take the French heading “Qui est derrière les fourneaux?” (“Who’s behind the stove?”) as an example. PTC suggested “Who’s behind the scenes?”, while DeepL came up with “Who’s in the kitchen?”, a much more literal translation that’s less suited to the context.

And what about manual translation in all this?

Automatic mode doesn’t suit every situation, and WPML knows that. That’s why manual mode remains available and fully functional.

You can still translate your content yourself from your WordPress dashboard, or assign that task to a member of your team.

This choice still makes complete sense in several situations:

• legal or contractual pages where every wording choice matters,
• a homepage or landing page with high commercial stakes,
• content whose tone or cultural references require genuine adaptation rather than a simple translation.

Nothing stops you from mixing the two approaches, either: let WPML automatically translate most of your content, blog posts or product pages, while keeping control over your strategic pages.

The new PTC AI engine: a closer look at a major WPML upgrade

PTC: what is it, and how does it work?

As you’ve just seen, translation automation is likely the most visible new feature in WPML 5.0.

But behind this development lies an even deeper change: a significant improvement to PTC (Private Translation Cloud).

This is the automatic translation engine developed in-house by WPML, which you already got a concrete first look at in the section we devoted to Translate Everything Automatically.

Since the release of WPML 4.9, PTC has been the default translation engine (it even comes with a quality guarantee). DeepL, Google Translate, and Microsoft Translator remain available, though, for every site running WPML.

Unlike a generic engine that translates each sentence in isolation, PTC takes your entire site into account as context.

As you saw in the setup wizard’s settings, you can give it the following guidance:

• your site,
• your content,
• your audience,
• your brand voice.

This ensures translations stay consistent with your tone and brand image.

On top of that, a glossary also lets you tell the PTC translation engine how to translate certain terms.

This saves it from having to make the same corrections over and over, as would be the case with the other engines.

An engine that gets it right 99.5% of the time

PTC brings three features we hadn’t seen from any competitor before:

1. Free re-translation of your edits. If you edit content that’s already been translated, updating its translation costs you nothing, as long as your edit doesn’t add words compared to the original text. This is a real shift from a model where every new translation would use up your current balance.
2. Learning from your corrections. When you regularly correct the same thing (a technical term specific to your industry, a product name, a mistranslated link), WPML picks up on the pattern and offers to apply it automatically going forward, so you don’t have to make the same correction every time.
3. A quality guarantee. As far as we know, WPML is the only plugin that guarantees the quality of its automatic translations: if a translation issue can’t be resolved, WPML will refund the cost of that translation. This guarantee only applies to PTC, since it’s WPML’s own proprietary engine.
4. Reuse of your existing translations. Thanks to its translation memory, PTC identifies sentences that have already been translated elsewhere on your site and reuses them at no cost. This allows you to reduce costs and ensure consistency in tone and vocabulary, with no effort on your part.

In terms of accuracy, PTC is said to be more accurate and more idiomatic (with a more natural result) than its competitors (DeepL, Google Translate, Microsoft Translator) because it’s able to take your context into account, along with the training of large language models (LLMs).

Of the four engines offered by WPML, PTC remains the only one capable of taking your context into account and leveraging existing translations on your WordPress site to make optimal translation decisions.

And honestly, after our testing, we can back that up.

“About 99.5% of the translations generated by our AI require no changes at all,” explains Dario, content manager at WPML. “The remaining 0.5% are generally limited to minor tweaks, such as style choices or subtle nuances.”

PTC: an AI translator on par with humans

On that note, WPML published a study comparing PTC to DeepL, conducted in April 2026 by its team of linguists.

The methodology is fairly rigorous: 227 pages translated with DeepL were assessed by native-speaking linguists, then 73 of them were re-translated with PTC and scored blind on the same criteria, across six languages (Arabic, English, French, German, Italian, Spanish), using a quality-scoring framework recognized in the industry, across nine distinct dimensions.

The result announced by WPML: PTC scores higher than DeepL across every dimension measured, with translations on par with those produced by human translators.

We didn’t have access to the raw figures from this internal study, but the methodology described seems rigorous enough to be worth citing, bearing in mind that it was carried out by the vendor itself.

One thing to watch out for before diving headfirst into PTC: along with its higher perceived quality (plus the ability to take advantage of translation memory and reuse earlier translations), the engine also costs more than the alternatives. DeepL and Google Translate are priced at 50% of PTC’s rate, while Microsoft’s comes in at 25% of the PTC rate, reflecting lower quality and fewer features (TEA and its related features, memory, glossary, free edits, only work with PTC).
On paper, PTC is therefore the most expensive of the four engines. In practice, the free re-translation of edits partly rebalances things over a site’s lifetime, since you don’t pay again every time you tweak already-translated content (translations already completed can also be redone for free).
Not to mention that the Multilingual CMS plan includes 22,500 words, which gives you plenty of room to breathe. To give you a sense of scale, 22,500 words is generally enough to translate a mid-sized site into two or three languages.

To recap everything we’ve just covered, we recommend watching this nicely condensed video that walks you through how to use WPML (translation with PTC, manual translation, etc.):

Where and how do you translate the rest of your site’s elements with WPML 5.0?

With PTC, you now have a seriously powerful tool for translating your posts and pages.

And let’s not forget everything else! Imagine for a moment that your content is perfectly translated, but your contact form stays in French, your main menu doesn’t switch languages, or your “Add to cart” button always appears in English.

The effect would be, to say the least, confusing for your visitors. It’s precisely to avoid this kind of inconsistency that WPML doesn’t limit itself to editorial content.

The plugin also handles everything that revolves around your pages… the kind of thing you tend to forget when planning a translation.

Among the main elements involved, you’ll find:

• navigation menus. You can automatically sync your menu structure across languages, or build them manually language by language if your navigation differs from one market to another.
• the widget areas. Often located in the footer or sidebar, they can be translated directly from the widget editor or from the translation dashboard.
• media. WPML lets you duplicate your images and files to offer different visuals per language, useful if you’re adapting visuals that contain text, or if you simply want to translate alt text and captions.
• taxonomies and custom fields. Categories, tags, and fields created with plugins like Advanced Custom Fields are supported, which is essential if your site relies heavily on custom fields through its theme or page builder.
• translation strings. These are what’s known as “strings”: text that comes neither from a post nor a page, but is hard-coded into your theme or plugins, such as a button label or a form error message.

All of these elements and options are accessible from the menu WPML > Translations. In fact, if you’re already familiar with WPML, you’ll notice, for instance, that the string translation panel disappeared with the release of WPML 5.0 🙂

Everything is centralized on the main dashboard:

After this overview of translating various elements, let’s take a look at how WPML integrates with tools that are essential for building a WordPress site today: WordPress themes and plugins.

Is WPML compatible with your theme or your plugins?

Compatibility is often the crux of the matter for a plugin as far-reaching as WPML, since it has to coexist with your theme, your page builder, your ecommerce plugin, and potentially a dozen other plugins.

On this point, WPML has made native Gutenberg compatibility a central selling point of version 5.0.

The plugin is now designed to work with the WordPress Editor and the CMS’s current standards from the ground up, rather than bolting a compatibility layer on top, as could be the case in the past.

One example? WPML supports Full Site Editing (FSE), which means you can also translate the headers, footers, templates, and other patterns of a block-based theme.

Beyond Gutenberg, WPML works with the leading page builders and plugins on the market, such as Elementor or the Divi Builder.

Speaking of Elementor, note that all its custom widgets from third-party tools are now automatically translatable with WPML (provided they follow Elementor’s standard development guidelines).

To dig deeper into the topic, check out the video below to see how to translate your Elementor site with WPML:

After Elementor, let’s not forget the most popular SEO plugin in the official repository, Yoast SEO.

A free add-on (WPML SEO) lets you translate the on-page SEO elements you add to your content with Yoast, such as:

• SEO titles,
• meta descriptions,
• URL slugs,
• image captions,
• breadcrumbs,
• social metadata.

WPML and WooCommerce

To make your WooCommerce store multilingual and multi-currency, WPML has a trick up its sleeve: the WPML Multilingual & Multicurrency for WooCommerce plugin, which you get automatic access to when you purchase the “Multilingual CMS” or “Multilingual Agency” license.

For WPML Multilingual & Multicurrency for WooCommerce to work properly, you obviously need to have WooCommerce activated.

Not sure how to set up your WooCommerce store? Alex walks you through it in this tutorial video:

After activating WPML’s ecommerce plugin, you’ll be pleasantly surprised to find a setup wizard, which will help you, among other things, to:

• translate your Shop pages,
• choose which attributes should be translatable,
• determine whether you need multiple currencies.

Translation (automatic or manual) then takes place on your WPML dashboard, in the menu WPML > Translations.

This is the nerve center from which you can, among other things:

• translate your products,
• translate your product categories, tags, attributes, and shipping classes for delivery,
• enable multi-currency mode,
• translate all the strings used by WooCommerce while building different types of URLs.

You’ll also find other types of settings under WPML > Settings > WCML.

On top of that, WPML Multilingual & Multicurrency for WooCommerce also lets you translate WooCommerce’s native emails (e.g., those related to a new order, a failed order, etc.).

We’ve focused in detail on WooCommerce, but know that WPML also offers additional add-ons to help you translate around a dozen well-known plugins, particularly those dedicated to building contact forms (Gravity Forms, Contact Form 7, Ninja Forms, WPForms, Advanced Custom Fields), as you can see below.

Support and documentation

If you’ve been following closely since the start of this article, you’ve probably realized just how wide-ranging WPML’s capabilities are.

But what happens if you run into a problem or need help? WPML has several options to lend you a hand, starting with a support team available 24/7.

The company offers customer support in ten languages, with experienced technicians spread across the world to cover different time zones.

English-language support is available through a ticketing system (a direct message to the support team).

If needed, you can also ask your questions on a public forum and check out their FAQ, not to mention browsing their thorough, well-illustrated documentation.

If you’re a fan of visual learning, you can turn to the plugin’s YouTube channel, which features around sixty well-targeted videos.

How much does WPML cost?

Three annual subscription plans

As mentioned at the start of this article, there’s no free version of WPML! The plugin runs on an annual license model, with three plans that differ mainly in the number of sites covered and the amount of automatic translation words included:

1. “Multilingual Blog,” at €39/year. The entry-level plan, limited to one production site and three development sites. It gives you access to manual translation from the WordPress Editor, but not to automatic translation or to advanced features like string translation or WooCommerce support.
2. “Multilingual CMS,” at €99/year. The most popular plan according to WPML. It covers three production sites and nine development sites, includes all the advanced features (translation editor, string translation, page builders, WooCommerce, site editor), plus 22,500 automatic translation words.
3. “Multilingual Agency,” at €199/year. You get the same features as the “Multilingual CMS” plan, but with unlimited sites and 45,000 automatic translation words.

Once your word quota runs out, you can choose to add more through a pay-as-you-go plan (where rates decrease based on the volume translated) or through prepaid packages.

DeepL and Google Translate are priced at 50% of PTC’s rate, and Microsoft’s at 25% of that same rate, reflecting lower quality.

All plans include a year of updates and technical support, as well as a thirty-day money-back guarantee if the plugin isn’t right for you.

Which license should you choose?

For the vast majority of users, the “Multilingual CMS” license offers the best balance.

This is the plan that lets you fully take advantage of WPML 5.0’s new features and everything the plugin offers:

• Translate Everything Automatically,
• PTC,
• WooCommerce,
• String Translation,
• full compatibility with the leading themes and plugins.

Finally, the higher-tier “Multilingual Agency” plan is primarily designed for agencies that manage “many multilingual sites” for their clients, WPML notes.

Our review of WPML 5.0: should you choose this plugin to make WordPress multilingual?

Having tested this new version in depth, our opinion of WPML remains positive, and it’s even stronger on several points thanks to the overhaul brought by version 5.0. Here’s our verdict, no beating around the bush.

WPML 5.0’s strengths

• Near-complete functional coverage. Very few elements of your site escape WPML, from posts down to the most obscure text strings.
• A finally unified interface. The end of fragmentation across multiple menus is, in our view, the most concrete improvement for day-to-day use.
• A serious AI translation engine. PTC brings real added value compared to generic engines, with a free re-translation system for edits that changes the cost logic over time.
• Broad compatibility, with page builders as well as WooCommerce and the leading themes on the market.
• Solid documentation and support, valuable for a plugin as rich in settings as this one.

The multilingual plugin’s limitations

• A price that remains an investment. Even though the plans stay reasonable given the features on offer, WPML is still a premium plugin, worth weighing against your project’s overall budget.
• A feature set rich enough to require a learning curve. Despite the simplified interface, WPML remains a comprehensive plugin, with many settings to understand in order to get the most out of it.
• A higher per-word cost on PTC than on the competing engines built in, even though the free re-translation of edits partly offsets this gap over time.

Who is WPML for?

WPML is primarily aimed at sites with a genuine, ongoing need to manage multiple languages over time: showcase sites for internationally active businesses, WooCommerce stores targeting several markets, blogs with a strong international audience, or agencies managing multilingual sites for their clients.

If your needs are limited to occasionally translating one or two pages, lighter, free, or less expensive solutions may well be enough.

But as soon as translation becomes a structural issue for your business, with a volume of content that keeps growing, WPML remains, in our view, one of the strongest and most complete choices in the WordPress ecosystem, and version 5.0 only reinforces that conviction.

Want to make your WordPress site multilingual with WPML? Discover all of the plugin’s features below:

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About the author

Thibaut | WPMarmite

Content manager and independent copywriter, I help my clients to develop their online presence. Freelance since 2011 and former sports journalist, I am passionate about webmarketing, WordPress and SEO on the professional side. On a personal level, I love series, reading and sports. I'm a huge football fan.