Migrating from Another Translation Plugin

Switching translation plugins is a straightforward process, though it does require generating fresh translations rather than importing your existing ones. This guide walks through what to expect and how to handle the transition cleanly for each major plugin.

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What Transfers Automatically

Nothing. Omnalingo does not import translations from other plugins. When you switch, it rescans your site and generates fresh AI translations from your current content.

This is intentional. Translation databases from other plugins use different internal formats and string-matching logic. Importing them risks bringing in stale strings — text that has since changed on your site — or translations that were produced with different context assumptions. A fresh scan gives you accurate results based on what your site actually says today.

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Why Rescanning Is the Right Approach

Your old plugin’s translations were produced from a snapshot of your content at the time they were translated. If you have updated pages, added products, or changed your site since then, those translations may already be out of date.

Omnalingo’s scan captures your current content accurately. Combined with AI translation, you typically get a complete first pass within a few hours, which you can then refine using the visual editor.

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Step-by-Step Migration

1. Install and activate Omnalingo. Both plugins can be active at the same time during the transition. Your old plugin will continue serving its translations to visitors while you set up Omnalingo.

2. Add your target languages in Omnalingo → Settings → Languages. Match the languages you had active in your old plugin.

3. Run content gathering. Go to the Content screen and start the gathering process. Omnalingo will index all your pages, posts, and other content types.

4. Run a full scan. Once gathering is complete, run a scan. This captures the text on each page and stores it in Omnalingo’s database.

5. Run bulk translation. Use Bulk Translation to generate AI translations for all indexed content. Depending on the size of your site, this may take a few minutes to a few hours.

6. Review and adjust. Use the visual editor to review translations and fix anything that needs a human touch. Pay particular attention to your homepage, key landing pages, and product descriptions.

7. Deactivate your old translation plugin. Once you are satisfied with Omnalingo’s translations, deactivate (but do not yet delete) your old plugin. Check your translated pages in a browser to confirm everything looks right.

8. Clear your cache. If you use a caching plugin, clear all caches after switching so visitors get the new translated pages immediately.

Tip

Keep your old plugin active until you are fully satisfied with Omnalingo’s translations. Running both simultaneously causes no conflict — the old plugin’s translations will simply not be shown once Omnalingo takes over the frontend output, but the data remains available if you need to reference it.

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Per-Plugin Notes

TranslatePress

TranslatePress uses URL-based language switching with a similar prefix structure to Omnalingo (e.g., /ro/about/). The URL format may differ slightly depending on your TranslatePress settings. After switching, check that your language URLs resolve correctly and update any hardcoded internal links if needed.

Hreflang tags are handled automatically by Omnalingo once your languages are configured.

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WPML

WPML creates actual duplicate WordPress posts for each translated language — a translated German page exists as a real page in your database alongside the original. Omnalingo uses virtual URLs instead; no duplicate posts are created.

After deactivating WPML, its translated posts remain in your database. To avoid duplicate content issues in search engines, delete the translated posts that WPML created before or shortly after switching. You can identify them in wp-admin — they will be posts with a language code in their title or slug. WPML also has a built-in cleanup tool under its settings.

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Polylang

Polylang, like WPML, creates real duplicate posts for translated content. The same cleanup applies: after deactivating Polylang, remove the translated post copies to avoid duplicate content.

Polylang’s URL structure (e.g., /de/about/) is similar to Omnalingo’s, so your existing links and any bookmarks visitors have saved will continue to resolve to the correct pages once Omnalingo is serving those URLs.

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Weglot

Weglot uses a proxy or CDN layer to serve translated content, which means your translated URLs are handled by Weglot’s servers rather than WordPress directly. When you switch away from Weglot, the URL structure for translated pages changes — Weglot’s URLs stop working as soon as you remove its DNS configuration.

Before switching:

• Update any internal links that point to Weglot-style translated URLs.
• Update your hreflang tags (Omnalingo handles this automatically once active).
• If you have built external backlinks to Weglot-served translated URLs, consider setting up redirects from the old URL patterns to the new Omnalingo-served URLs.

After switching, clear your CDN cache to ensure Weglot-proxied responses are no longer served.