Weglot is a WordPress multilingual plugin to translate and display your website in multiple languages. Founded in 2016, Weglot is trusted by more than 50,000 websites owners and developers, with an average rating of 4.9/5.0 (700+ reviews). Key benefits include: simple and quick set-up, multilingual SEO best practices, compatibility with any Themes and Plugins (incl. WooCommerce) and more.

Do you want to know more about our silver sponsor Weglot? We asked Augustin (the CEO of Weglot) a few questions!

How did the company get started?

Back in 2015, myself and Rémy had one simple idea – to help businesses automatically translate and display their website without the need of developers.

With many translation plugins already on the market – we had a different idea in terms of how Weglot would help users. We wanted to create a translation plugin that would firstly be really simple to set up, powerful, encompassed multilingual SEO best practices, and most importantly, was fully compatible with all themes and plugins.

By December 2015, a few months after the initial idea was formed in Rémy’s small Parisian flat, we had launched the first version of the plugin. It’s funny to mention, but at this point, WordPress was just a name we had heard of, but knew nothing about!

Next came the testing process where we involved the help of friends and various startups we knew, and it was at this point that they started asking if we were available on WordPress. And, essentially that’s how we entered the WordPress space.

From that point on, we haven’t looked back. Things took off quickly and we’ve been scaling ever since, with an office in central Paris and 18 employees who are continually developing a translation plugin that’s now the highest rated on the WordPress Directory.

What lessons were learned since the start of the company?

From the very beginning we knew that customer feedback was going to really shape how Weglot developed and putting the user first was really important.

We found that this was integral to our development process. Without the constant feedback from the very beginning, even now, we wouldn’t have been able to make Weglot what it is.

We really pride ourselves on listening to our customers and adding features that we can see will really benefit our users. When we first began, whenever a feature was asked by more than 10 different users a week – it meant it was time to add it.

We also learnt that in order to create a WordPress translation plugin that really works, our team needed to grow too.

In mid-2017, we took on a new developer and a customer support specialist which made us four. This really helped accelerate things and meant Rémy and I no longer needed to chat live with users late into the night to help solve any issues!

As I said before, we’re now a team of 18 – with space for more!

How do you see your company evolving in the next 5 years?

We’ve achieved a lot with Weglot during the last four years, and the plan is to continue growing and offering the best translation plugin on the marketplace.

Every week we add new features to our plugin and we don’t see that slowing down. We just released a universal version of Weglot, meaning it can be used on any website technology or platform, bringing headless internationalization to any website.

But our development on WordPress won’t slow down either. Additional features over the last year included button placement and an enhanced AJAX compatibility, and a more flexible private/ public mode.

For now, the aim is: to keep building on our success and become the most used translation plugin in the world.