Yoast SEO 14.0: using Yoast SEO surfaces

In Yoast SEO 14.0 we’ve introduced a formal way of integrating Yoast SEO into your code. We’ve added what’s called a surface called YoastSEO(). This surface gives easy access to lots of the features Yoast SEO has to offer. In this post I’ll show you some of the different helpers that are now easily accessible if you’re building an integration.

We’ll cover:

• Getting SEO data for the current page.
• Accessing (and using) our helpers.

Easily access SEO data for the current page

This is probably how most people would’ve integrated with Yoast SEO up till now: running one of our pieces of code and getting the title from it or the description. This was never really “easy”. It always involved getting an instance of our WPSEO_Frontend class, something like this:

WPSEO_Frontend::get_instance();

After that you had to do a bunch of stuff to get to our titles, and we never really made any of that easy. Now you can simply do this to get the title:

$title = YoastSEO()->meta->for_current_page()->title;

Need the description? Just as easy, you can even immediately echo it:

echo YoastSEO()->meta->for_current_page()->description;

The current_page surface exposes every bit of data we have on the current page, which all work in the same way; it’s a long list:

Whether you need the OpenGraph description or the robots array, this has you covered. Get used to opening your favorite IDE, typing YoastSEO()->meta->for_current_page()-> and see the type hints for the exact bit of data you need.

For other pages?

You’ve probably guessed it when you saw the for_current_page() bit. You can do this for other pages and page types too. This would work, if post ID 2 exists:

YoastSEO()->meta->for_post( 2 )->title;

Even better, let’s say you have the URL https://example.com/test-page/:

$title       = YoastSEO()->meta->for_url( 'https://example.com/test-page/' )->title;
$description = YoastSEO()->meta->for_url( 'https://example.com/test-page/' )->description;

If that URL doesn’t exist in the Indexables table it’ll return false.

Easy access to our helpers

Sometimes you need more than just the raw SEO data of a page. For instance, you need to know whether the current post type should be indexable at all. Well, our post_type helper can help with that:

YoastSEO()->helpers->post_type->is_indexable( get_post_type() )

This will return a simple boolean. If you’d rather have a list of indexable post types? You should use:

$public_post_types = YoastSEO()->helpers->post_type->get_public_post_types();

The same works for taxonomies:

YoastSEO()->helpers->taxonomy->is_indexable( 'category' );

There are quite a few of these helpers, and not all of them may be equally useful to you. But do have a look around in your IDE and see which ones we have to offer, this too is a rather large list!

Joost de Valk

Joost is an internet entrepreneur and the founder of Yoast. He has a long history in WordPress and digital marketing. On our blog, he has written a lot about SEO in general, technical SEO and important topics related to SEO.