Yoast was perfect, but is in a steep decline
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Yoast did everything well in the past. Seriously, it was a big fat five stars for years… It was lightning fast, clean coding and did the SEO job perfectly. It was truly one of a kind. But unfortunately the plugin is now on it’s way down now. The plugin has been sold to the highest bidder that wants to earn it’s money back.
The result? Lately they are adding tons of new unnecessary features to the plugin that nobody really needs. It tries to upsell you stuff from other brands and plugins that you ‘can’ connect to (if you buy another premium of course, because the free options are pretty much useless, right Zapier?), and it creates a lot of unnecessary bloatware.
The plugin is becoming too complicated and heavy. More than once I have now encountered critical errors when updating the plugin because of incompatibility issues. It has cost me a lot of time fixing these issues, triggering backups, etc.
This was never an issue before. I am now hesitant with every update they push. Will my website crash again? Will there be more bloatware added to the plugin once again?
I think Yoast as a company really needs to think about re-doing their plugin. Make a basic, but lightning fast premium plugin that does the SEO job, and separate all the bloatware from the original plugin.
If they continue to go in this direction, I’m sure they will not only lose me as a customer, but tons of others.
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Hi @xchristox,
Thanks for taking the time to write a review. We’re sorry to hear that nowadays you don’t like Yoast SEO as much as you used to.
We understand that you’re not quite happy with the 3rd party integrations we’ve added to the plugins lately. We’d like to clarify that we only integrate with products that we believe are beneficial to our users and can help them with their SEO. For example, the Zapier integration allows you to easily configure automated actions, i.e. post a tweet, when you publish content on your website. Such integration is available for free, and you don’t really need a premium Zapier account to be able to use it (although, a premium Zapier account will provide you with additional features). The 3rd party integrations are available in the plugin under Yoast SEO > Integrations, and you can simply disable them if you don’t plan to use them.
As for your comment regarding critical errors, we extensively test new plugin versions before we release them. Unfortunately, despite such testing, Yoast SEO 19.5 included a bug where a fatal error would be thrown if the free plugin was used with an older version of Yoast SEO Premium. We sincerely apologize for the trouble this might have caused to your website. Our development team released a patch the same day, but I can imagine how concerning it must have been if your website was affected. Our team has learned the lesson and will improve the testing processes to prevent such situations in the future.
We really appreciate your feedback. We’ve passed it along to the appropriate team members within the company. Rest assured we’ll do our best to keep you as a happy user for many more years!
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