Can You Use DeepL with WordPress? 4 Ways to Translate Your Site

Summarize this post with: 8 min read

ChatGPT Perplexity Grok Google AI

Yes, you can use DeepL to translate a WordPress site, but not on its own. DeepL is a translation engine: it turns text into other languages through its API or its apps. WordPress needs something else to find every piece of text on your site, send it to DeepL, store the result, publish each language on its own URL and keep it updated. In practice you have four routes: a multilingual plugin with a DeepL integration, custom code against the DeepL API, manual copy and paste, or a website translation service that handles the whole workflow.

Key takeaways

• DeepL supplies the translations. A WordPress plugin or service supplies the multilingual website around them: language URLs, a switcher, hreflang, editing and updates.
• Polylang Pro and the paid versions of TranslatePress integrate DeepL directly. Polylang Pro uses your own DeepL API key.
• Coding your own integration with the DeepL API is possible, but you then own storage, caching, SEO tags and updates.
• Once you are choosing between good engines, the engine matters less than a human review of your main pages, a glossary and correct hreflang tags.
• If you don’t need DeepL specifically, a service such as ConveyThis translates the whole site automatically and lets you edit the output, without per-post setup.

What DeepL does, and what it doesn’t

DeepL sells two different things, and people often mix them up:

• DeepL Translator and DeepL Pro are apps and a web interface for people who translate text and documents by hand.
• The DeepL API is a programming interface that other software calls to translate text automatically. Plans and prices are on DeepL’s API page.

For a website, the API is the part that matters, because a plugin or service has to call it automatically. Neither product creates translated pages in WordPress by itself. Something else has to:

1. Collect the text: posts, pages, menus, widgets, theme strings, WooCommerce products, SEO titles and image alt text.
2. Send it to DeepL and store the translations.
3. Publish each language on its own URL, such as /fr/ or fr.example.com.
4. Add hreflang tags and a language switcher.
5. Let you correct translations and retranslate when content changes.

Those five jobs belong to the WordPress side.

Option 1: A WordPress multilingual plugin with DeepL built in

Most sites go this way. Two well-known plugins list DeepL support on their own sites (checked 28 September 2026):

• Polylang Pro. According to Polylang’s pricing page, machine translation with DeepL is included in Polylang Pro and the Business Pack and requires “your own API key”. It translates content from the post or page editing screen. The free Polylang plugin does not include machine translation.
• TranslatePress. Its automatic translation documentation states that the free version supports Google Translate, while paid versions also offer an integration with the DeepL API.

The setup usually goes like this:

1. Create a DeepL API account and copy your API key.
2. Install and activate the plugin’s paid version on your WordPress site.
3. Add your languages in the plugin’s settings and choose the URL structure (usually subdirectories like /de/).
4. Paste the DeepL API key into the plugin’s machine translation settings and enable automatic translation.
5. Translate a few pages, check them on the front end, and adjust anything that reads wrong.
6. Add the language switcher to your menu or footer.

This route fits a WordPress-only site where you want translations stored and managed inside WordPress and don’t mind paying for two subscriptions (the plugin and the DeepL API).

Keep an eye on API usage costs, which grow with the number of characters you translate. Check what the plugin sends to DeepL (every edit, or only new text) and whether it caches results.

Option 2: Your own code against the DeepL API

Developers can call the DeepL API directly from a custom plugin or a build script. DeepL’s developer documentation explains the endpoints; note that Free and Pro API accounts use different base URLs (api-free.deepl.com and api.deepl.com).

You get full control, but you are now building a multilingual system. You will need to decide where translations live, how to invalidate them when a post changes, how to translate theme and plugin strings, how to generate language URLs and hreflang tags, and how editors correct a bad sentence. Unless your requirements are unusual, a maintained plugin or service costs less over time.

Option 3: Copy and paste with DeepL Translator

For a small brochure site with a handful of pages, you can paste text into DeepL, then paste the translation into a manually created page in a multilingual plugin such as free Polylang. It is slow and the languages drift out of sync easily, but it costs little. Once the site has more than a few pages or changes often, it stops being worth the effort.

Option 4: A website translation service

A website translation service works at the site level instead of the post level. It detects all visible text, including text added by your theme, page builder and plugins, translates it with machine translation, and serves each language on its own URL.

ConveyThis works this way on WordPress:

• Install the ConveyThis WordPress plugin from WordPress.org (1,000+ active installs, rated 4.4/5 from 145 ratings), pick your languages, and the site is translated automatically as a first draft. Our step-by-step WordPress translation guide covers the setup.
• Edit any sentence in context with the visual editor, and invite reviewers with team roles.
• Use a glossary to keep product names and brand terms consistent, and translation memory to reuse approved translations.
• Each language gets its own URL (subfolder, subdomain or ?lang), with automatic hreflang and translated meta titles, descriptions and JSON-LD for multilingual SEO.
• It works with WooCommerce stores and page builders, and the same account can translate sites on other platforms.

One difference to know: with ConveyThis you don’t connect your own DeepL key. ConveyThis handles the machine translation, and you refine the result. If using DeepL specifically is a hard requirement, choose Option 1.

How to choose

For a broader plugin comparison, our guide to choosing the best WordPress translation plugin goes deeper.

Getting good results, whatever the engine

Good engines produce good first drafts. Most of the quality difference you will notice comes from the work around the engine:

• Write a glossary. Decide which terms stay in English (your product name, feature names) and how industry terms should be translated. Both Polylang/TranslatePress-style setups and ConveyThis let you apply rules like these.
• Have a fluent reviewer check the pages that earn money: home page, pricing, product and checkout pages. See our guide to post-editing machine translation.
• Translate the SEO fields. Titles, meta descriptions, image alt text and slugs are easy to miss.
• Check hreflang. Every language version should list itself and all the others, or Google ignores the tags (Google Search Central).
• Don’t auto-redirect visitors by browser language. Offer a clear switcher instead, since Google recommends against automatic redirection between language versions (Google Search Central).

FAQ

Can I use DeepL with WordPress to translate my site?

Yes. Use a multilingual plugin that integrates the DeepL API (for example Polylang Pro, or TranslatePress’s paid versions), write your own integration, or copy translations manually. DeepL alone does not create translated WordPress pages.

Is there an official DeepL WordPress plugin?

DeepL is typically used through third-party WordPress plugins that connect to the DeepL API with your key. Check each plugin’s documentation for which DeepL plans it supports.

Do I need DeepL API Pro or is the free API enough?

That depends on how many characters your site has and how often it changes. Compare your site’s size with the limits on DeepL’s API plans before you start, and remember that retranslating edited content adds to usage.

Is DeepL better than other machine translation for websites?

DeepL is well regarded, especially for European languages, but the review process, glossary and SEO setup around the engine usually matter more than the engine choice. Test your own content in your target languages.

Does ConveyThis use my DeepL API key?

No. ConveyThis handles machine translation itself, and you edit the results in its visual editor. If you must use your own DeepL key, a plugin such as Polylang Pro is the right choice.

To translate your WordPress site without per-post setup, create a ConveyThis account and install the plugin.