Yoast SEO 5.2 Accessibility, compatibility and bug fixes

Today we’re releasing Yoast SEO 5.2. In this brand new version you’ll find some feature enhancements, accessibility improvements and a couple of bug fixes. In addition to that, we’ve laid some groundwork that will help us make Yoast SEO work well with the plugins our users use most. Read about all the improvements here!

Before we dive in, if you want to learn more about accessibility and other essential SEO skills, you should check out our All-around SEO training! It doesn’t just tell you about SEO: it makes sure you know how to put these skills into actual practice!!

Accessibility

Web accessibility is something we always urge website owners to think about and improve. As we can’t let our own products fall behind, we regularly work on the accessibility of the plugins we develop. This time, we scrutinized the accessibility of the onboarding wizard of Yoast SEO and improved it so everyone will be able to use it well. 

Redirects for private posts

The redirects manager of Yoast SEO Premium is one of the features we’re most proud of. It makes creating redirects – and therefore preventing 404s – so much easier, and helps site owners to be less dependent of developers. As of this release, we’ve added an enhancement to this feature. From now on, if you trash a post that’s set to private, Yoast SEO Premium will also ask if you want to redirect the old url to a new one. 

Compatibility

One thing that keeps challenging plugin developers like us is to make plugins work with all the different plugins that our users use. There are so many plugins out there – not even to mention the various combinations of plugins that exist. To improve the compatibility of our plugins, we’ve added tracking to find out which other plugins our Premium users have installed. This will help us tremendously in making Yoast SEO work flawlessly on more WordPress installs. For the same reason, we’re tracking which PHP version our user’s websites are running on.

Speaking of PHP, if your site is running on PHP version 5.3 or lower, you couldn’t have missed the notice to urge you to move to a newer version since our 4.5 release. Does this WHIP notice keep annoying you? Then we have some good news for you. You can now dismiss the notice. After 4 weeks it will pop up again though, as we still believe upgrading to a newer PHP version is the best way to go.

That’s about it. Go update to 5.2 and enjoy this brand new version of Yoast SEO!

Read more: Why every website needs Yoast SEO »

Coming up next!


16 Responses to Yoast SEO 5.2: Accessibility, compatibility and bug fixes

  1. Smuf
    Smuf  • 7 years ago

    Thanks for fix these problem from Yoast plugin

  2. jeannette
    jeannette  • 7 years ago

    I was asked to confirm email address the link doesn’t appear to be working that was sent to me. It just sent me to back here.

  3. jeannette
    jeannette  • 7 years ago

    How do I upgrade please

  4. Fransisca Tan
    Fransisca Tan  • 7 years ago

    Love Yoast Redirect manager. Makes my SEO life easier.Thank you :)

  5. Leonard Gaither
    Leonard Gaither  • 7 years ago

    Keep up the great work. If you are a reader here and you would like to watch videos on how to use yoast we have information videos to show you all the cool tricks to useing yoast.

  6. Jason Antrosio
    Jason Antrosio  • 7 years ago

    Thank you for all the great work. I’ve become a premium user for my site Living Anthropologically. My one concern is that with all the features, perhaps especially the link suggestions, Yoast seems to be drastically slowing down my WP dashboard. It’s getting to the point where I’m deactivating the plug-in just to edit, then turning it back on. Any suggestions on how to speed things up?

  7. John
    John  • 7 years ago

    Love Yoast Redirect manager. Makes my SEO life easier.Thank you :)

  8. Judith@BoostBlogger.com
    Judith@BoostBlogger.com  • 7 years ago

    Good job Yoast! Now bloggers don’t have to hire individual web developer to do some technicalities when it comes to Yoast SEO.

    • Willemien Hallebeek

      Hi Judith, Thanks! That’s exactly what we aim for :-)

  9. Jacob McKinley
    Jacob McKinley  • 7 years ago

    Hi Willemien! Thank you for your update. Redirects manager, this function is great! That’s an easy way for me to process my mail.

  10. Anne Octaviane
    Anne Octaviane  • 7 years ago

    Muchos Gracias for your post.Really looking forward to read dan learn more from you.

  11. Shashank Gaur
    Shashank Gaur  • 7 years ago

    Hey nice blog you provide a very important information regarding SEO. In SEO there are so many points were we need to work and i think this one of most important part in SEO.

  12. Melanie Cruz
    Melanie Cruz  • 7 years ago

    The redirects for private posts is really great. I often get into trouble when I accidentally trash a post but forgot to redirect it before.

  13. Adil Mirza
    Adil Mirza  • 7 years ago

    sir, i have a suggestion if you consider. Please add functionality to consider Singular and plurer in focus keyword, problem is that we cannot do keyword stuffing but yoast seo consider only exact match when it comes to focus keyword. Some people therefore stuf their blog posts with a single keyword because they think we must have to get a good keyword density score if we want our blog to rank well in SERPs. This practice later return them a Google penalty

    • Willemien Hallebeek

      Hi Adil, we do have a functionality to add multiple focus keywords in Yoast SEO Premium. This means you can optimize for singular, plural or synonyms for example. And to prevent keyword stuffing we do have a max limit for keyword density, if you pass this limit, you’ll get a red bullet. But my main advice is to always use common sense and keep in mind the readers when you write something: make sure your text is easy and natural to read.

  14. Jay
    Jay  • 7 years ago

    Keep up the awesome work. This is easily my favourite and most vital plugin!!!