The two architectures
Cloud proxies (Weglot, ConveyThis, GTranslate paid tiers). Your translations are produced and stored on the vendor's servers. Setup is genuinely easy, and the SEO plumbing is solid. The catch is structural: you are billed on cumulative word counts that include metadata and never reset, and if you ever cancel, your translated pages stop being served. On Weglot, cancelled projects are deleted after 3 months, and export is gated to a plan costing roughly $4,000 per year.
Local storage plugins (WPML, TranslatePress, Polylang, JurisLingo). Translations live in your own WordPress database. Cancel the license and your translated pages keep working. The tradeoff has historically been more setup and management work.
For a law firm planning to invest years into Spanish content, that difference is not a technical detail. It decides whether your Spanish rankings are an asset you own or a service you rent.
Quick verdicts
Weglot is the easiest to launch and the hardest to leave. Fine for a short experiment, expensive for a growing firm, and the exit costs you everything you built.
WPML is the mature choice for firms with bilingual staff who want full editorial control. Fair pricing near €99 per year, but real ongoing labor: translation jobs, credits, string registration. Its machine translation is generic engine output.
TranslatePress offers the best value for hands on site owners: local storage, a great visual editor, from $99 per year plus your own translation API costs. No legal awareness, no migration tooling, no analytics.
JurisLingo is the vertical specialist, built by a legal marketing agency for law firms only. Local storage like WPML and TranslatePress, but with legal tuned AI translation (practice areas phrased the way Spanish speakers search, disclaimers kept faithful for bar compliance), automatic hreflang and Spanish slugs, an importer that migrates your existing Weglot library before you switch, and a dashboard tracking Spanish leads and calls. Early access is $19.99 per month.
How to decide
Ask three questions. Do you keep your translations if you cancel? If the answer is no, understand you are renting. Who is responsible for legal terminology being right in Spanish? With generic tools, that is you. And can you prove the Spanish site signs cases? Only one of these tools measures that at all.
For the line by line breakdowns, see the full ranking of translation plugins for law firms and the detailed JurisLingo vs Weglot comparison, both of which cite vendor pricing and documentation for every claim.