8 Reasons Why Yoast SEO is Not Good for Your WordPress Site

Yoast SEO is the most popular SEO plugin for WordPress sites. Earlier known as WordPress SEO, it has 5+ million active installations and 25K+ 5 star ratings in WordPress plugin page. Though the plugin works fine from SEO perspective, it has problems from other dimensions. Let us explain, why Yoast SEO may not be a good option for your WordPress site.

1. XML Sitemap Issues

In our earlier article, we have explained how to fix Sitemap issues with Yoast SEO. During initial stages, you can decide the number of URLs included in the Sitemap thus adjusting the size. This is really an essential feature, especially when you hosted site on shared hosting services to avoid server related HTTP errors like 500 or 508. However, later they removed the limits and by default each Sitemap will grow till 1000 URLs. This will create problems as shared hosting servers will struggle to load large number of URLs in a single Sitemap. It also will create crawling problems when Googlebot try to crawl all the URLs from single Sitemap.

First test and ensure, your XML Sitemap is loading if you use Yoast SEO on larger sites.

2. Breadcrumb Customization

Yoast SEO included the breadcrumb functionality from the beginning. Nowadays, breadcrumb is a part of many commercial themes and also Google by default shows the breadcrumb navigation from your category structure. This makes the feature redundant. In addition, you need to modify theme’s header or single.php files to insert the breadcrumb. Though you can use child theme, we don’t understand why it can’t be included as part of the plugin feature.

3. Meta Box Loading

Yoast will load meta boxes on post / page editor. There is also an option to choose primary category for the breadcrumb navigation. These features use JavaScript and will drastically affect the page loading when you create a new post or open a post for editing. This in conjunction with Gutenberg will make your editor dead and you need to wait for long time than usual.

4. Too Many Updates

This is seriously insane!!! We have never noticed a plugin gets update ridiculously in every few days. With user complaints in WordPress forum, now they have changed the update frequency to two weeks. However, this is also unacceptable to release a buggy version just for the timeline purpose and then carry on with multiple bug-fixing updates. The question comes to everybody’s mind is simple – why can’t the developer test patiently and then release the updates? When you run a larger site, plugin update needs lot of testing and work. With so frequent updates, you will be frustrated to think of alternatives or leave the old version without updating.

5. Lots of Ads

In general, advertisements are ok for the free plugin. However, Yoast SEO should have made lots of money from WordPress ecosystem and very popular to get customers with minimal advertisement. They really don’t need to show so many ads on the admin interface in our opinion. In fact, what a free redirection plugin does is part of the premium Yoast SEO version. The below ad like message will show every time when you delete the content.

6. Support Issues

This is again a typical issue when companies grow bigger. You will not get any free support in WordPress forum. Recently Yoast guys started responding on the forum actively. However, you will not get precise answer for your queries on support forums when thousands of people post their opinions.  

7. Spell Check Not Work in Meta Box

One of the funny and frustrating problem is that the Yoast text inputs in the post editor meta box will not work with the spelling check. Though the entire page work based on the browser’s spell check, it does not work for Yoast at least on Mac Chrome. Since, most the people type meta description directly on the page, you need to ensure typing without spelling mistakes.

8. Create DB Tables

Yoast SEO plugin will create at least two database tables for text link counter and meta data. In addition, it also will create entries in option table for each post. When you install and delete the plugin, you need to manually go to database and delete the tables and entries to clean up. Though database entries will help to delete and re-install the plugin again, most users are not aware about the backend table entries.

Conclusion

The plugin page on WordPress repository says – Yoast SEO for everyone. However, we can guarantee tell that this plugin is not for everyone. Fortunately, there are many SEO plugins available for free as well as premium. If you face problems with Yoast SEO, try one of the alternatives that works for you. Most of the plugins also offer migration setup from Yoast making your job easier.