WPML is paid for at licence time and paid for again at every renewal. The translations you have already made, though, are yours: they can be moved to a free solution without rewriting a single one and without losing your rankings.
WPML’s public prices for the first year. The renewal is what keeps updates and support coming.
€39
The entry plan: you translate posts and pages, and little else.
€99
What a real site needs: custom fields, menus, themes. It’s the plan almost everyone ends up buying.
€199
For anyone running several client sites.
The point isn’t the first year’s price: it’s that it comes back every year, for the whole life of the site. Over five years the CMS plan becomes a cost that adds up on its own, while the site itself has stayed the same.
Everyone asks this. The answer has an uncomfortable half.
The translations stay online. That much is true, and it’s why so many people let the licence lapse and forget about it.
WPML says so itself: without a renewal you no longer receive new versions. A plugin that touches every page of the site, standing still while WordPress and PHP move on, becomes over time the most fragile piece you own.
No licence, no support. The day something breaks you’re on your own, on a plugin several versions behind.
One thing I’ll say plainly: if someone has offered you a «cracked» copy of WPML or of any other paid plugin, that’s a road I won’t take you down. It isn’t a moral point: those copies circulate modified, and a site that lives on visitors is the wrong place to save money. If one is already installed, it gets removed and put right, without judgement — it has happened to me more than once.
The live site isn’t touched until the new one has been checked page by page.
How many languages, how many pages, what kind of content. Custom fields, a WooCommerce catalogue or translations written by a professional show up beforehand: those are the things that decide whether the migration is simple or delicate.
The real site stays up and keeps working. The migration runs on a clone, where if something goes wrong nobody notices.
The ones you have already paid for or written stay exactly as they are. Nobody throws away finished work to start again from machine translation.
The addresses of the translated pages, the hreflang tags, the sitemaps. This is where a badly done migration burns your rankings: addresses change, Google loses the pages, and traffic falls with no obvious reason.
WPML doesn’t get uninstalled on day one. It stays switched off but present until you say everything is fine. The way back always exists.
If I told you it always works out, I’d be selling you something.
Translated products, variants, currencies and checkout are the most delicate part. It can be done, but it’s serious work: if someone brushes it off as half a day, they haven’t looked.
With an active licence there is a support service behind you. If that guarantee is worth the fee to you, keeping it is a perfectly reasonable choice.
Themes and plugins built around WPML have to be rebuilt, and there the sums change. That gets assessed up front, not halfway through.
The plugin I use for migrations is mine: free, published in the official WordPress directory, with no paid version and no limit on languages. If one day I disappear, the plugin stays there and stays free.
A site in six languages, already live and already ranking, migrated keeping every existing translation and every page address. No interruption for the people visiting it.
Once the migration is done the site is yours and runs on its own, on a plugin anyone can maintain. I don’t leave you with one dependency in place of another.
Send me the site address: I’ll look at the state it’s in and tell you whether it’s worth it, whether it’s delicate, or whether you’re better off staying where you are. I work as an individual, open to projects and collaborations.