Can You Use DeepL to Translate Your WordPress Website? (And a Translation Plugin That Handles the Whole Site)

Over 50% of Google searches are in languages other than English. That means you can drive more organic traffic by translating your website.

DeepL is one of the most accurate AI translators available. But it doesn't offer a dedicated website translation feature, meaning you can't use it to translate your entire WordPress site out of the box.

This post covers what DeepL does well, where it falls short for full website translation, and what alternatives exist.

What DeepL Offers

DeepL is an AI translation tool available as a free web translator or paid Pro plan, supporting over 30 languages. Its main strengths:

Accuracy – DeepL's core advantage. When compared against competitors, DeepL outperformed them by 3:1. The tool suggests alternative phrasings, offers formal/informal registers for languages like German, and lets you create custom glossaries for brand-specific terminology.

Security – Texts are deleted immediately after translation, with end-to-end encryption and full EU data protection compliance.

Scalability – Pro plans include unlimited text translation, multi-user collaboration, file translation (up to 10MB, including HTML), and CAT tool integrations (Trados, memoQ, Across) on higher tiers.

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Can You Use DeepL to Translate an Entire Website?

DeepL works well for translating individual pages or blog posts. But there's no built-in feature for translating an entire website.

Without additional tools, you'd need to manually copy-paste content into DeepL, then paste translations back into your site. A famously time-consuming process while being prone to missing buttons, banners, and other UI text.

The alternative is DeepL's API, which connects your site to DeepL's translation engine programmatically. But this requires technical implementation on your end.

We dive deeper into this subject in the video below and show a simpler way to translate a whole website with AI.

Let’s look at the other option:

DeepL has a translation API that can connect your website to DeepL’s translator. In essence, this feeds your website content to DeepL’s translation software. Once the translation’s complete, DeepL provides you with the translated version of your content. 

DeepL Pro vs. DeepL API

To avoid any confusion, let’s quickly outline how DeepL Pro and DeepL API work. 

DeepL Pro is for manual translation work. Unlimited text, file translation (up to 10MB), glossaries, and team collaboration.

DeepL API is for programmatic integration. It mainly translates HTML/XML and connects DeepL to your website or app. The free tier allows 500,000 characters/month; the Pro tier charges a base fee (~$5.49/month) plus ~$25 per million characters.

For website translation, you need the API. Pro alone won't automate your site.

WordPress Plugins That Integrate DeepL (And One That Handles Translation for You)

Several WordPress plugins integrate DeepL's translation engine, each taking a different approach to how the API connection works and what you need to manage yourself.

Weglot is a no-code AI website translation plugin, and it takes a different route from the other options on this list: there's no DeepL API key to generate or paste in, because Weglot's AI Translation Model handles the translation for you and shapes it around your Brand Voice and Translation Guidelines, so what goes live already sounds like you. Once installed, it detects all content on your site, translates it, and displays your translated pages under language subdirectories. It also manages multilingual SEO like hreflang tags, language-specific URLs, and translated metadata out of the box.

TranslatePress offers DeepL integration through its Business and Developer plans. You'll need to generate your own DeepL API key and paste it into the plugin settings. TranslatePress then uses the API to automatically translate your pages, storing translations locally in your WordPress database. It includes a visual editor for refining translations on the frontend.

WPML added DeepL as a translation engine option within its Advanced Translation Editor. Like TranslatePress, it uses DeepL's API through WPML's own credit system rather than letting you connect your API key directly. WPML is a long-standing multilingual plugin with broad compatibility across WordPress themes and page builders.

Polylang Pro introduced DeepL machine translation in early 2024. It requires a DeepL API key (free or Pro tier) and lets you translate posts and pages from within the WordPress editor, but it does not work with Elementor. Polylang takes a post-level approach to multilingual content, creating separate posts for each language.

The key difference between these options comes down to how much you want to manage yourself. Plugins like Polylang Pro give you direct API access but leave the website infrastructure (URL structure, hreflang, language switching) to you. Weglot handles the full stack, from AI translation to multilingual SEO and content display, without requiring any API setup or technical configuration.

Weglot: A Translation Plugin for WordPress With AI Translation Built In

Weglot is a leading translation plugin for WordPress that pairs AI translation quality with everything else you need for a fully translated website. Every translation is shaped by your Brand Voice and Translation Guidelines, so it lands on-brand from the very start and you spend your time reviewing, not rewriting.

Unlike DeepL, it doesn’t require any technical knowledge. There’s no API to connect: Weglot translates your content and serves the translated pages for you. 

The setup is simple. You only have to install one plugin, and you’re ready to translate all parts of your website. You also stay in control: set your Translation Guidelines and exclusions, and invite collaborators to look over the translation with you. 

Best of all, every AI translation can be edited by hand, in bulk from the Translation List or in context from the Visual Editor. 

On top of all that, the plugin comes with the following standout features:

• Translates and displays your site’s content. A multilingual website involves more than translating the content. As we mentioned, if you used DeepL alone you’d have to copy and paste every translation back into your CMS. Weglot detects all the content on your site, translates it, and displays it under language subdirectories automatically. 
• The Visual Editor. Review and edit translations in context, on the frontend of your website, so you can see where a longer string has changed the layout and fix it on the spot.
• Visitor auto-redirection. Weglot reads your visitor’s browser language and redirects them to the version of your site translated into that language. You switch it on or off in the Weglot dashboard. 
• Image Translation. Translate the text inside your images in one click from the Visual Editor, while keeping the original design intact.
• SEO-optimized. Weglot follows multilingual SEO best practices, including translated metadata, language-specific URLs, and automatically added hreflang tags. 
• A fully translated customer journey. You can use Weglot to translate the entire customer journey, including landing pages, popups, and emails.

Weglot’s AI Translation Model draws on leading AI models rather than a single engine, so you’re not limited to one provider’s language list. In total, the plugin supports over 110 languages, including Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, and Dutch, well beyond DeepL’s range.

Learn more about choosing the best translation plugin for your WordPress website.

Here's a table summarizing the two solutions:

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Are You Ready to Translate Your WordPress Website?

DeepL is a strong choice for translating individual content pieces. But for full WordPress website translation, including SEO, dynamic content, and the entire customer journey, it requires API integration and additional tooling.

Weglot handles this out of the box: automatic detection, AI translations true to your brand, SEO setup, and visual editing in one plugin.

Start your Weglot 14-day free trial.