We’ve created the fastest related posts ever
When we say “related posts for WordPress“, we say “bad performance”. Without using an external service like ElasticSearch, it’s practically impossible to have related posts work fast in WordPress. That’s why we’ve always stayed away from including any related posts plugin on our site. It’s also the reason we haven’t tried to come up with a solution ourselves before. In the […]
Let us care for your site: Yoast SEO Care
As a hard-working site owner, it is often difficult to find the time to work on issues that are holding your company back. You might find that the blog posts of your competitor appear higher in search results, but you don’t know what to do about it. Or, you might discover that your site isn’t […]
Yoast SEO 3.9
It’s high time for a new release of our SEO plugins. Since moving to a two-week release schedule, we’ve fixed more bugs than ever and added some awesome new features. With version 3.9, we are gearing up for the big four-oh. In that last release of this year, we will add something remarkable. But let’s not […]
How to change your WordPress permalink structure
At Yoast, whenever we do a website review, we frequently recommend people change their permalink structure. In this post, we’ll explain why you should consider changing your permalink structure and how to go about it. Why change your WordPress permalink structure? A common thing we see in permalink structures are the usage of dates. For websites […]
SEO basics: What’s a slug and how to optimize it
In SEO, we often talk about creating the right slug for a page. But what is this really? And why should you optimize it? In this post, we’ll explain all you need to know about it. When you google “what’s a slug”, you’ll find that the definition we’re looking for is “a part of a URL […]
Ask Yoast: importance of using excerpts
Do you want to increase click-through rates to your posts or pages? Craft great excerpts! In this video Joost explains why excerpts are important.
How to reduce HTTP requests to speed up your WordPress site
Having a website, online shop or blog that’s fast is a must nowadays. A fast website doesn’t only give your visitors a much better experience, but it also helps your website to rank. Sending fewer HTTP requests to the server can improve the loading times of your website. But why is that? What are HTTP […]
Ask Yoast: what’s a slug?
For this edition of Ask Yoast, we received a question that belongs in the SEO basics category: what’s a slug? The answer is simple because it’s the piece of the URL that distinguishes a post. In this Ask Yoast, Joost explains what a slug is and what its SEO benefits are. This Ask Yoast is all about the […]
How to create a 301 redirect in WordPress
There will be times where you want to redirect visitors to a different part of your website when they visit a particular page or post. Reasons for this can be that you renamed a post and its URL, a page was removed or you want a different page to rank. Redirects in a nutshell The name ‘redirect’ […]
Documenting JavaScript in WordPress
Ever since the release of the 3.0 version of the Yoast SEO plugin, JavaScript has been a big part of it. We rely on it to make high-end features possible, like real-time content analysis. The decision to use JavaScript meant that the development team had to make a lot of choices about technologies and tools. […]
W3 Total Cache high-risk XSS vulnerability
Just today, WP Media pointed us to a high-risk XSS vulnerability in W3 Total Cache (W3TC). This was a very popular WordPress plugin that has over 1 million active installs. Although it’s a very popular plugin, it hasn’t been updated in over six months. We stopped recommending it a while back for WP Rocket, a W3 Total Cache […]
WordPress: How to noindex a post!
Some posts and pages should not show up in search results. To make sure they don’t show up, you should tell search engines to exclude them. You do this with a meta robots noindex tag. For example; you might not want people to find the “thank you”-page you redirect people to when they’ve contacted you. […]
Interview with Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten (TNW)
Now this a quote we love: “…being patient and providing quality pays off…“. It’s one of the lessons Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, co-founder of The Next Web (TNW), shared with us in this interview. TNW owns one of the most visited tech news sites, and they organize large tech events around the world. Besides that, TNW also offers gadgets for […]
10 ways to promote your WordPress blog for beginners
If you’ve just started off your WordPress blog and want everybody to read your content, then you should promote your blogs on multiple online platforms.
Yoast SEO 3.5
We’ve just pushed out a new release of Yoast SEO, our flagship plugin. The new version, 3.5, mostly has a metric ton of small bugfixes. In this post, we’ll discuss the most notable changes, but you should mostly be aware that this is what we would call a bugfix release. XML Sitemap changes We’ve decided to […]
Why every website needs Yoast SEO
Every website needs an SEO plugin. More specifically, every website needs our SEO plugin. For most websites, Google is the most important source of visitors. No matter how important social networks can be for a site, SEO is often the most important factor for a site’s growth. Not following SEO best practices, or not doing SEO at all, […]
How to implement Google AMP on your WordPress site as easily as possible
With the news that Google will be rolling out its accelerated mobile pages (AMP) to all organic listings beyond the ‘Top Stories’ you’ll be forgiven for getting a little bit panicky.
Blog post checklist
What do you need to write that awesome blog post? What steps do you need to take? Use this blog post checklist to make sure you covered everything: 1. Do your keyword research! You want your blog post to rank in the search engines. Make sure you write your blog post on a topic that will […]
Blog post planning
Maintaining a blog takes more than just writing a bunch of blog posts. You should develop a strategy and planning for your content (especially if you are writing with multiple authors). Also, you should interact with your audience and respond to their comments. In this post, I’ll explain the importance of content planning and give […]
Yoast SEO 3.4: accessibility first
Today we’re releasing Yoast SEO 3.4, a release mostly aimed at improving our accessibility. Which means you won’t see most of the changes, but they’ll make a world of difference to others. We’ve also improved our readability checks and how we deal with some languages, more on that below. Accessibility changes When we hired Andrea a […]