The honest answer is that it depends on one number nobody tells you to measure first: how many words your site actually contains. Everything else follows from that. This page walks through the real arithmetic with three worked examples, so you can price your own case before anyone quotes you.
Step one: measure the site, not the pages
Translation is priced per word, and the count that matters is unique words — the same navigation menu repeated on 200 pages is counted once by most tools. A rough rule for a typical small business site:
- Brochure site, 8–12 pages: roughly 5,000–10,000 words.
- Site with a blog, 40–60 posts: 40,000–80,000 words.
- Shop, 500 products with short descriptions: 60,000–120,000 words, plus the theme and checkout strings.
Then comes the multiplier everyone forgets: the count is per target language. Five languages means five times the words, because each one is a separate translation job.
Step two: the three things you can actually pay for
- A professional translator. Market rates sit around €0.08–0.15 per word for European language pairs, more for rare ones. Best quality, and the only sensible option for legal or medical copy.
- Machine translation you buy through a plugin. The plugin resells translation capacity as “words” or “credits”, bundled with the licence and topped up when you run out.
- Machine translation you buy direct. You hold the account with DeepL, OpenAI, Google or Anthropic and pay their list price, with nobody in between. Their free tiers are generous enough that many sites never pay at all.
Three worked examples
Take a real case: a 12-page site, about 8,000 words, into 4 languages — so 32,000 words of translation. Figures checked in August 2026; confirm on each vendor’s pricing page, they change.
| Route | Cost | Shape | How it works out |
|---|---|---|---|
| Professional translator | €2,560 – €4,800 | one-off, per revision | €0.08–0.15/word × 32,000 |
| WPML | €99/year + credits | recurring | Multilingual CMS includes 90,000 credits/year |
| TranslatePress | €99/year + word packs | recurring | Personal includes 50,000 AI words; extra packs sold separately |
| Weglot | €290/year | recurring | Business: 50,000 unique words, 3 languages — 4 languages needs the tier above |
| TranslateRocket + your own DeepL key | €0 | — | 32,000 words ≈ 190,000 characters, inside DeepL’s free 500,000/month |
Entry tiers, simplified for comparison: plans also differ in how many sites and languages they cover and which features are included. The translator figure is a market range, not a quote.
The number that changes everything: how often you republish
A one-off cost and a recurring one are not comparable, and this is where most comparisons quietly cheat. A translator bills once for text that does not change. A subscription bills every year whether you touched the site or not — and if you keep publishing, the word meter keeps running alongside it.
Over five years, that 12-page site costs roughly €495 with a €99/year plan before a single new page, and about €1,450 on a €290/year plan. The translation work itself was done in week one.
What the free route actually costs
Not zero — it costs your time, and it is worth being straight about which parts:
- Setup: about an afternoon for a small site, most of it waiting for the machine translation.
- Review: this is the real cost. Machine output is a draft. The fifty strings that actually sell — page titles, calls to action, the checkout — deserve a human read in each language. Budget an hour per language and the result is close to professional for the parts that matter.
- New content: each new page needs translating, but the engine reuses strings it has already seen, so a new post costs only its genuinely new sentences.
If your text is legal, medical or your entire brand voice, pay a translator — no plugin substitutes for that. For everything else, the realistic comparison is a paid subscription against your own review time.
So what should you do
- Small site, few languages, content that rarely changes — the free route with your own AI key and a careful review. There is no recurring cost to justify.
- Shop with a large catalogue — count the words first. This is where per-word pricing gets expensive fastest, and where paying the AI provider directly saves the most.
- Legal, medical, regulated copy — a professional translator, every time. Use a plugin to manage and publish their work, not to replace it.
- You need a support contract or a translator workflow — buy a licence. You are paying for the service around the translation, which is a legitimate thing to want.
Try the free route — unlimited languages
