Yoast SEO 5.4

The developers at Yoast HQ are quite the busy bees. In the past few weeks, we’ve released Yoast SEO 5.3 – with some pretty cool features -, helped build a plugin that provides the ‘glue’ between two of the biggest WordPress plugins out there and launched an innovative new customer portal called My Yoast. After the dust has settled, it’s time to release the next version of our flagship plugin: Yoast SEO 5.4. Find out what’s new and what’s fixed.

Redirects in Yoast SEO Premium

The redirects manager in Yoast SEO Premium is pretty awesome, if I may say so. It helps you with everyday redirect tasks, so you don’t have to worry about this. So, whenever you deleted a post or change a URL, the redirects manager will ask you if it should redirect the old content to the new content. This way, visitors will never stumble upon pages that don’t exist anymore, resulting in the dreaded 404 error message.

In Yoast SEO 5.3, we added the possibility to export all your redirects in a CSV file. This file gives you a complete overview of all the redirects on your site. In Yoast SEO 5.4, we’ve made it possible to import a redirects CSV file. Now, you can make (bulk) changes to your redirects within that CSV file and import it again when you’re done. Changes will take place immediately. There are loads of scenarios where this will come in handy, for instance, when you’re rebuilding a site and want to replace the same redirects. You’ll find the import and export features in the Tools section of Yoast SEO.

Technical improvements

Today’s releases mostly feature improvements that make sure that Yoast SEO runs like a well-oiled machine. To increase the performance of the plugin, we’ve replaced the use of `get_posts` and `get_children` by `WP_Query`. This release’s community input came from Saša Todorović – who has been very active lately – and Pete Nelson. The first proposed a fix to exclude archive pages from the sitemap, based on the noindex setting. The latter suggested a hook to disable the Twitter card.

Happy updating!

The updated Yoast plugins are now available, so go get them! We’re working around the clock to bring you a helpful product that makes SEO easier for everyone. We hope you enjoy working with Yoast SEO and value the improvements the plugin brings. Happy updating!

Read more: Why every website needs Yoast SEO »