Yoast SEO 20.0: A brand-new settings interface

 

Meet your new SEO best friend

With Yoast SEO, we’ve always focused on building the best WordPress SEO plugin out there. We worked on the features first while forgetting the experience for a bit. So a new interface for Yoast SEO was a long time coming.

It’s not hard to give an interface a new coat of paint, but thoroughly rebuilding it from the ground up is a lot of work. It means rethinking what goes where, what we want to be able to do in the future, and what this all should look like. Luckily, we pulled it off!

The new user interface we introduce in Yoast SEO 20.0

A better interface for you and us

We’ve worked hard to bring you this great new setting UI for Yoast SEO. For us, it’s the end of an era and the beginning of a beautiful future. This new interface makes it much easier for us to incorporate new features and improve Yoast SEO while giving you a modern experience that is a joy to use.

Joost de Valk, the founder of Yoast, explains: “We felt that the default WordPress admin design no longer suited us. Our product team was itching to take our experience to the next level. WordPress’s interface was holding us back a bit, as the admin interface outside Gutenberg hasn’t progressed for years.”

“I’m proud of what the team has built in the Yoast SEO 20.0 release,” says Thijs de Valk, CEO of Yoast. “Our team wanted to do this, and they delivered. It is a technically outstanding change and proves we are constantly improving and optimizing. Our new user interface shows we’ll keep delivering the best possible experience to our users. A very exciting first step in 2023!”

A logical structure for settings in Yoast SEO 20.0

The first thing you’ll notice about the new interface is its sleek, modern look and streamlined navigation. The new sidebar lets you quickly and easily access all essential settings and features without navigating multiple pages or menus. We’ve even added a search feature to find everything you need in a jiffy.

In our help documentation, you can find a guide on navigating the new settings interface in Yoast SEO 20.0 and what moved where. Or, check out the video above to get a walkthrough of the new settings.

Four main sections

We reshuffled the contents of the old settings and divided them into four main sections:

• General:
  • Site features: here, you can easily switch specific features on and off, from the different analyses to IndexNow and the XML sitemaps.
  • Site basics: in this section, you can find the basic information about your site, like the name and tagline of the website, plus force rewrite options and the like.
  • Site representation: this section contains information about your site that helps search engines understand it better through Schema structured data, like if the site represents a person or an organization and which names, logos, and social media accounts are associated.
  • Site connections: here, you can connect the different search engine tools to your site, like Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.
• Content types:
  • Here, you’ll find your site’s settings for each content type. You can determine how each should appear in search, what it should look like on social media, and what types of Schema structured data describe this content best.
• Categories and tags:
  • Same as the content types, except this is for your taxonomies.
• Advanced:
  • Here, you’ll find features like the Crawl optimization settings in Yoast SEO Premium. Plus breadcrumbs options, plus settings for various archives and special pages.

Improved admin bar menu

 Today, we’re cleaning up the admin bar menu and expanding the range of options. If you are a Yoast SEO Premium user, you can open up the front-end SEO inspector instantly to check the SEO settings of the page you are currently on. You’ll also find the focus keyphrase you set for this page and the overall readability and SEO scores in the famous colored dots. Plus, you can find quick links that let you send the page to be analyzed by external tools, like Google’s Rich Results Test or PageSpeed Insights. Of course, you also access the Yoast SEO settings from there.

Updated admin bar menu in Yoast SEO 19.12

Of course, there’s more. We’ve added a new Website name text field in the Site representation step of the First-time configuration. You can also set this in the Search Appearance section of the settings.

We’ve also worked on improving compatibility with PHP 8.2. In addition, we now ask users to update to a recent version of PHP, as we are dropping support for PHP < 7.2 starting March 1st, 2023.

Enjoy these Yoast SEO updates

In this release, we’ve added support for our inclusive language analyses to our free Yoast SEO version. Try it out and see if you can write more inclusive content that will help you reach a broader audience.

It’s up to you whether you activate the analysis

 It’s good to know that the inclusive language analysis is opt-in, so it won’t be activated by default. It’s up to you whether you want to get feedback on the inclusiveness of your content. You can activate it by going to Yoast SEO > General > Features and toggling the inclusive language analysis switch. If you choose not to use this feature, the SEO and readability analyses won’t change.

Activate this feature ve language analysis in Yoast SEO > General > Features

We strongly suggest using it as it can benefit your SEO and helps you make your content relatable for a bigger audience. The goal of inclusive language is to avoid excluding or alienating people. So, this new analysis helps you create content that everyone can enjoy and that’s less likely to offend anyone!

Other improvements and fixes

Of course, we’ve also worked on improvements for our SEO plugins. For instance, we’ve improved the subheading distribution assessment to make it easier to find those overlong paragraphs. Now, hit the eye icon to highlight the subheading where the piece of text appears. Very helpful when working on long articles! The same assessment also keeps an eye on your intro and warns you if you start your article with an overly long introduction.

Quickly find overly long pieces of text

We’ve improved our Integrations page, making it clearer which WordPress plugins hook into our Schema API. This means that the structured data output by these plugins will be neatly tied into the graph Yoast SEO generates for the site. Together, this forms a very comprehensive Schema solution. We urge other plugin developers to come on board — check out our Schema documentation!