Yoast SEO 3.1: Improved snippet editor and primary category

Today we’re releasing Yoast SEO 3.1. It’s a release we’re truly very proud of in terms of functionality but also in the process we’ve gone through. Yoast SEO 3.0 was arguably our biggest release ever, with a lot of changes that needed to happen but it also lead to issues. Yoast SEO 3.1 aims to keep the good things of 3.0 while fixing the things that most people didn’t like.

Let me explain to you in the video below or keep reading below:

Snippet editor interface

The snippet interface has been changed to bring back the normal input fields, while keeping the real time feedback that we brought in 3.0. Of course, we still have more ideas on how to improve it, but we think this is a huge step forward:

Primary category

When you select multiple categories for a post, you could never determine which category was the most important. Which also meant you could never determine which category would show in the breadcrumb. Now you can:

Admin overhaul

In the admin pages we had checkboxes that disabled functionality and checkboxes that enabled functionality. Yeah that was almost as painful as that sentence. We now have toggles, instead of checkboxes, which should reduce the ambiguity:

Improved redirects feature

In our Premium plugin, the redirects feature got a lot of love. It’s now easier to serve 410 content deleted headers and you can serve 451 headers as discussed in a previous post. We’ve also made editing redirects a much nicer experience:

If you don’t have Premium yet, go get it. It rocks :)

Integrations

Several page builder plugin authors have worked with us to make sure Yoast SEO works with all the content on a page. Notable here are both Divi and Visual Composer. We also would like to thank Marcus Forsberg for working with us on making a well working ACF integration. We’ve just released that as a separate “glue” plugin on WordPress.org to allow for faster iterations. You can find that here.

Coming to you from my living room!

In a weird turn of events, we didn’t have electricity in our office this morning, so we released Yoast SEO 3.1 from my and Marieke’s living room:

Let us know what you think!

Now, if you’re interested, go read the full changelog, then go update & go play. Please let us know what you think in the comments, we’d love to hear your feedback! I think 3.1 proves that we’re listening :)