If you have ever tried to translate a massive WordPress site using traditional plugins like WPML, you already know the pain of database bloat. Every translated post duplicates an entry in your database. Do that across five languages, and your server will start crawling under the weight of thousands of redundant rows.
ConveyThis avoids that mess entirely. Similar to its main rival Weglot, ConveyThis relies on a proxy architecture. It sits as a layer above your site, translating content on the fly and serving it to the user dynamically. Your original database remains completely untouched, yet you still capture the critical SEO benefits like proper language subdirectories and automatic hreflang tag injection.
Where it actually shines
The setup process is notoriously fast. Discussions on Reddit frequently highlight how this proxy method avoids conflicts with complex page builders and custom WordPress themes. You paste a snippet or install their plugin, and the machine translation takes over immediately.
The Visual Editor is the feature you will spend the most time in. Instead of staring at a massive, disconnected spreadsheet of strings in a backend menu, you view your actual live website and click directly on the text you want to change. It is highly practical when you need to hand a page over to a human translator to fix the inevitable weird phrasing that AI produces.
Another major draw is the cost relative to the competition. Weglot is the heavyweight in this specific proxy translation space, but ConveyThis consistently undercuts them on price. For users who need to manage growing sites on a budget, this price difference is often the sole reason they switch.
The limits that will cost you
You need to pay very close attention to the pricing tiers before committing. ConveyThis bills on a strict metered model that restricts both your total translated word count and your monthly translation requests, which are essentially page loads by foreign language visitors.
The Free tier gives you one language and a 5,000-word limit, paired with just 2,500 monthly translation requests. The Starter plan at $12 per month bumps that to 30,000 words and 15,000 requests. If your site gets a sudden spike in international traffic, you will burn through those translation requests rapidly. You will then be forced onto a higher tier like the $64 per month Pro plan, which offers 400,000 words and 200,000 requests.
Users on platforms like Reddit and Product Hunt point out a specific frustration with that much-praised Visual Editor: when a text string is wrapped in heavy HTML or custom CSS formatting, it can be painfully difficult to isolate and edit manually. You might find yourself digging into the backend glossary rules to force a fix when the visual tool fails to grab the right element.
For affiliates and agency partners, there is a weird friction point during onboarding. There is no standalone partner portal. You are forced to create a standard product account just to join their affiliate program, and details like their cookie window or minimum payout threshold are completely unpublished.
The final call
Pick ConveyThis if you want the proxy architecture of Weglot but want to pay significantly less for it. It is an excellent fit for Shopify, Webflow, or Squarespace sites where traditional database translation plugins are not even an option.
Skip it if your site has millions of words of user-generated content and consistently high traffic. The metered billing on both words and page views will punish you financially as you scale. In those edge cases, a traditional database translation plugin with a one-time fee is going to be far cheaper in the long run, even factoring in the performance hit to your server.