Are you looking for a Yoast alternative search engine optimization plugin? Here, we’ve shared the five great alternatives to Yoast you can use.
Why use an SEO extension? The WordPress content management system generates many pages; not all pages should be in the index of Google and Bing. Canonical tags can prevent duplicate page issues on a website, and you may want to set a custom description/title for a page. You’ll need an SEO plugin for these four tasks and many other tasks.
Why use a Yoast alternative extension? Yoast is a good plugin, but it may not have features you want to use, or you may have been using it for a long time and want to try another extension.
Rank Math
Yoast was introduced in 2008. From 2008 to 2017, a plugin named All In One SEO was its best alternative. In 2015, RM dethroned AIOSEO to become a top Yoast alternative. RM is a modular extension, i.e., you can turn off features you find worth not using. It features a tabbed settings page and comes with a setup wizard. Configuring the SEO settings is thus easy with it.
Rank Math can redirect users to other pages and also lets users insert a schema in the post while creating a post. It also rates the post 0 to 100 points based on 15+ factors. Rank Math has an AI-powered content analyzer, and it also enables you to track the website’s keyword rankings. Its premium subscription plan is cheaper than Yoast’s subscription plan. Rank Math is a complete search engine optimization plugin, but it would have been great if the RM could detect passive voice in phrases like Yoast.
All In One SEO
AIOSEO was the top search engine optimization plugin for a few years in the last decade. It lost thousands of users to Yoast. Here are a few probable reasons why people switched to Yoast:
Outdated settings page: The extension’s settings page remained the same for several years. AIO changed only after another company bought and renovated it.
No new features: This WordPress search engine optimization extension didn’t get new features, but its competitor Yoast got dozens of new features. For example, it was updated with a content analysis function.
The latest version of All In One is currently the best alternative to Rank Math and Yoast. It has 3 million active users and several new features that the plugin’s older edition lacked. For example, the premium version of AIO ships with an advanced schema module and breadcrumb templates. It also supports custom fields and enables you to create and manage redirects.
The Premium version includes an image SEO module, a link assistant utility, and a feature manager utility. The free edition has settings you’ll find in the free version of other search engine optimization WP extensions we’ve shared here and some exciting tools as well. For instance, it lets users create a custom robots.txt file from the WP dashboard.
SEOPress
SEOPress is another top search engine optimization plugin for WordPress. It has certain features which Yoast lacks and lacks some features you’ll find in Yoast. For example, it lets you enable instant indexing and create and manage schemas of products, books, events, etc. The extension doesn’t have a content analyzer such as the one offered by Yoast.
Like Rank Math and Yoast, SEOPress rates the content on the page while you’re working on the content. It also displays the score and content analysis warnings below the post editor, and the other plugins we’ve covered above keep the same right in front of the user. With SEOPress, you can see the page speed score of your site in the WordPress dashboard.
Key features of the above search engine optimization extensions:
Sitemap: The Yoast alternatives can create a sitemap for your site. You can configure them to create multiple sitemaps instead of dumping all URLs in one XML file. SEOPress has an HTML sitemap function.
Basic SEO settings: The plugins let you control what pages of your site should be in the index and enable you to set a custom description/title for the post.
Attachment redirect: If not redirected properly, attachment pages will be indexed by search engines. To prevent this, you can make the above extensions redirect attachment pages to their parent post.
Instant indexing: The three search engine optimization plugins we’ve covered above support Instant Indexing.
WP Rocket
Website speed is a search engine ranking factor, according to Google. Thus, we can consider WP Rocket as an SEO plugin. Yoast doesn’t have website performance-related settings. SEOPress users can check the page speed score only. It won’t let you improve the page’s performance.
WP Rocket doesn’t have any SEO settings, but it can make your website faster than websites not using a caching extension. There are plenty of free caching plugins. Why use WP Rocket? WP Rocket can find critical CSS of a website and inline the same in the website’s HTML code. For those who don’t know, a user can fix Google Core Web Vitals LCP, CLS issue by simply inserting critical CSS in the site’s header. WP Rocket lets users eliminate unwanted database records inserted into the DB tables by WP CMS, themes, and plugins. It preloads the cache to improve page response times and concatenates/minifies CSS/JS files.
Image SEO
Images can be responsible for the slow loading times of your website. Why is this so? Transferring large photos takes more time than sending a smaller picture. This applies to not only humans but also web servers. When the visitor requests a page, the web server will send the requested page to the visitor, and every file linked to the page and accessible via the same domain. The file can be a stylesheet, JS file, video, or image. If you embed large pictures on the page, the page’s loading time will be affected. To compress large photos, you must use an image optimization plugin for WordPress. Besides making the image smaller (size-wise), the extensions can add alt tags to the pictures.
Closing words: These are the best search engine optimization plugins you can use to make your site search engine friendly.
