Yoast SEO 5.9 A more accessible content analysis

A new release doesn’t always have to bring incredible features, as it can silently set the stage for bigger things to come. Yoast SEO 5.9, released today, is such a release. While this release doesn’t contain groundbreaking new features, it does provide an important new piece of the Yoast SEO puzzle for the future: we’ve rebuilt the content analysis in React.

More accessible content analysis results

While the content analyses itself haven’t changed, the way we present the results has changed in Yoast SEO 5.9. To improve the user experience and accessibility of the results, we’ve decided to group these into several groups: Good, Considerations, Needs improvements and Problems. These follow roughly the colors of the bullets from green to red. This allows you to focus on your most important SEO issues first.

By grouping the results this way, colorblind users, for instance, can easily discern the difference between the results. Also, every header is collapsible. You can get the green bullets out of the way to focus on the red ones.

Thanks to this new grouping of the results you get a more structured overview of the SEO of the piece you’re working on. Before, it was one big list that became more cluttered with every added check. Now, we’ve added a new focus to the analysis, making it easier to use. You’ll fix your SEO in no time!

new content analysis yoast seo 5_9

Reactify all the things

Rebuilding stuff in React probably doesn’t mean much to you but is an important part of making Yoast SEO futureproof. React is a JavaScript library for building user interfaces. By using React, we can break up Yoast SEO into several parts so we can more easily maintain it and significantly improve it. Not only that, by dividing everything into blocks, we make it easier to adapt Yoast SEO to that new challenge called Gutenberg.

Gutenberg forces us to rethink our product and the way we build said product. It brings us loads of challenges, but also opportunities to bring Yoast SEO to new heights. But before we can do cool new stuff, we need to format our work in such a way that we can easily adapt it to the new Gutenberg editor environment. We’ve already rebuilt several parts of Yoast SEO, like the Configuration Wizard and the Help Center, in React. This process will continue for a little while until every visual aspect of Yoast SEO is ‘reactified.’

So, what else is new?

Besides fixing a load of bugs in Yoast SEO 5.9, we’ve also added several enhancements that make the plugin easier to use. We’re also adding a new focus on our onboarding wizard that has helped so many first-time users set up their Yoast SEO install in record time. We’re now showing a notice nudging users to open the onboarding wizard when the plugin is installed for the first time. We’ve also made the ‘Next’ and ‘Back’ buttons in the onboarding wizard focusable, to improve accessibility.

We’ve also introduced the wpseo_add_opengraph_additional_images filter so you can add additional OpenGraph Images with a lower priority. The order in which you place OpenGraph images determines which one  Facebook shows, which is usually the first one. This led to issues with WooCommerce SEO as their Gallery images always appeared on top. With the new filter, you can add additional images to the OpenGraph image list. These should not be shown as the default image, but you could use these for more advanced purposes. Some sites allow you to pick any image found in the list.

Update now!

That’s Yoast SEO 5.9 for you! With this new release, we’re continuing the renewal of our foundation to make sure we can build an awesome new house in the future. We’ve also fixed loads of bugs and enhanced some parts of the plugin to make sure you can do work in the best possible fashion. Happy updating!

Read more: Why every website needs Yoast SEO »

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16 Responses to Yoast SEO 5.9: A more accessible content analysis

  1. Swapnil Narayan
    Swapnil Narayan  • 6 years ago

    Hey,
    From last few days i can’t use Yoast SEO plugin and i face problem in 5.9.3 version. I’m not able to set focus keyword, can’t set SEO score and readability.
    Please tell me why this is happening?
    Thanks in advance.

  2. Michele
    Michele  • 6 years ago

    Dear developer,
    I notice that the new Yoast SEO 5.9 isn’t compatible with WordPress 4.7.8. I continue to use that version because there are many other plugins that don’t support newer version of WordPress.

    Why do you not continue to develop update for WordPress 4.7.8?

  3. WordPress
    WordPress  • 6 years ago

    Looking forward to working with the new update

  4. Standa
    Standa  • 6 years ago

    Thank so much for the update. But i don’t see the change about increase the length of meta description. In the next update, Edwin?

    • AJ Anderson
      AJ Anderson  • 6 years ago

      I too, wonder about the new increased length for meta descriptions.

      • Edwin Toonen

        Yep, it will be in the next update which is around the corner ;)

  5. nexvan
    nexvan  • 6 years ago

    Hi, how can I redirect the correlations with the plugin?
    Teach me

  6. Lucas
    Lucas  • 6 years ago

    Why do I no longer see a count of how many outgoing and incoming links for each page/post?

  7. Danielle Kim
    Danielle Kim  • 6 years ago

    Hi,
    Google officially increases length of snippets in search results from 160 characters to almost 230 characters on average.

    I hope Yoast will has new update for this changing !

    • Edwin Toonen

      Hi Danielle. Google seems to automatically generate these longer snippets and we have not yet seen instances where our own longer descriptions show up in the results. We are actively investigating this and will update Yoast SEO when we have an answer to this.

  8. Peter Bowler
    Peter Bowler  • 6 years ago

    This sounds like a sensible improvement that directs us to make the right changes for each page or post. The “problems” should always have the highest level of importance, so that’s great.

    • Edwin Toonen

      Yeah, it makes much more sense like this, doesn’t it? Thanks, Peter.

  9. WWE Hindi
    WWE Hindi  • 6 years ago

    Hey, Thank you so much for updating Yoast, It is the best plugin in the world.

  10. Thomas | TrekkingTrails
    Thomas | TrekkingTrails  • 6 years ago

    Thanks for the update! But why have you not taken into account that google allows since two weeks longer descriptions? The plugin seems not to be updated in that regard. It still shows a limit of 156 characters while google allows 3-4 lines (!) as description. To be fast right know to update the descriptions is essential in terms of SEO, isn´t it?

    • Edwin Toonen

      Hi Thomas. Google seems to automatically generate these longer snippets and we have not yet seen instances where our own longer descriptions show up in the results. We are actively investigating this and will update Yoast SEO when we have an answer to this.

  11. Alex
    Alex  • 6 years ago

    Looking forward to updating today! Thanks for the detials.