Yoast SEO has caused websites to crash!

The well-known WordPress plugin Yoast SEO created a few issues last week, with its 19.5 update causing fatal errors for some websites.

Users have experienced more difficulty than they might have expected when they tried to update to Yoast 19.5. These included people tweeting to say that their website was not working and hasd a critical error, then tweeting again later to say that the error was caused by the Yoast SEO plugin.

….And this is why I wanted to switch my site to @Wix. There goes my afternoon as I have to figure out why THIS happened pic.twitter.com/p98MlfGSMj

— Eli Schwartz (@5le) August 10, 2022

What has been changed?

Yoast version 19.5 has changed to help improve the user experience of the plugin, and also fixes some issues with the Article schema (also known as structured data).

The biggest change in this update was the improvement of the front-end SEO inspector that gives you an overview of your posts and SEO data, including your meta tags (meta titles and descriptions), as well as adding schema to your site to help search engines understand your content.

What can I do about the error if I come across it?

All you need to do is get your web developer to remove the Yoast SEO plugin from your website and then reinstall it, as a new version has now been released that fixes the problem.

At Engage Web, we do use the Yoast SEO plugin, but we have recently been testing out the Rank Math SEO plugin as well. This gives you some of the features you get in Yoast SEO premium for free, including adding advanced schema to your site. Watch out for a social media video on this soon!

Are you looking to increase your traffic to your website to improve your business’s sales and leads? Get in touch with our team at Engage Web to see how we can help you do just this through developing a digital marketing strategy to help you get in front of your target audience.

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Jonathon Roberts

Jonathon lives and breathes marketing, boasting a degree in Business Management and Marketing Management and a diverse list of experiences both professional and voluntary. Having grown up in the thick of the digital and social media age, he has been quick to dive into online marketing and search engine optimisation in his career and spare time, spanning such fields as academics, local business and sport.

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