Upcoming release: Yoast SEO 14.0 – Indexables

Team Yoast, while all working from home for the first time in our history, is working on one of the biggest improvements to Yoast SEO yet. This release, Yoast SEO 14.0, internally has the codename “Indexables”. This release, while fully backwards compatible, will change some of our known integration API’s. If you integrate with Yoast SEO you should therefore test with it as soon as possible.

What is changing?

This is basically a full re-build of all our front-end code. We will write blog posts about specific bits of it, but these are the highlights:

• We’re moving all of our meta data from wp_postmeta to custom tables. This allows for far more efficient querying.
• We’ve moved to using an ORM on top of$wpdb.
• Our frontend architecture now uses dependency injection from Symfony.
• We’re adding a REST API endpoint for easy integration in headless WordPress sites.
• Our Schema API is changing.
• We’re opening up a set of new API surfaces to make integration with Yoast SEO a lot easier, you can also more easily add meta tags. Read the documentation if you’re integrating with Yoast SEO, and update your code to be ready for 14.0 if you need to.

How can I test this?

You can find our latest Release Candidate below. You can also check out the release/14.0 branch from our GitHub repository and test your integrations. You’ll find that we add a couple of database tables and that these database tables are filled slowly as you and other people browse your site. The first page load of a page can be slightly slower because of that, after that it’ll be faster. In our testing it looks like the frontend of your site will be anywhere between 5 and 20% faster depending on how many other plugins you run and what your theme is like (the heavier all the other stuff, the lower the impact of our speed improvements).

When is this coming?

Our scheduled release date is Tuesday, April 28th 2020.

Why didn’t I hear of this before?

If you didn’t hear of this before and would have liked to because you’re integrating with Yoast SEO in some way, we’re sorry! We have a special channel on our Slack for integrators, with whom we’ve already shared a zip for testing. Please do reach out to @jjcomack, @Michiel Heijmans or @joostdevalk on the WordPress slack.