As a site owner, you understand the significance of SEO in driving organic traffic and increasing visibility. Keeping your SEO efforts up to date is essential to stay ahead of the competition. The same goes for developing an SEO plugin — to keep you at the top of your game, we need to be at the top of our game. That’s why maintenance releases like Yoast SEO 21.9 are so important.
The importance of maintenance
Regular maintenance is essential to ensure optimal performance of Yoast SEO. Our latest release introduces various enhancements, optimizing the plugin for an improved user and search engine experience.
Through ongoing maintenance, we address specific bugs and issues within the plugin, enhancing its stability and reliability. Keeping your plugins updated allows you to enjoy a seamless and error-free experience.
Improvements in Yoast SEO 21.9
One of our improvements in Yoast SEO 21.9 is an enhanced sitemap rewrite rules mechanism, ensuring smoother functionality and improved performance. In addition, we’ve made significant optimizations to the update process. From now on, rewrite rules will no longer be cleared for every option update, eliminating unnecessary operations. Instead, the rewrite rules will only be cleared when changes are made to the ‘strip category base’ option.
Sitemap image filters
Yoast SEO 21.9 introduces a new option based on user feedback. With this release, we have enabled filtering images for taxonomies and the homepage in the sitemap. This user-requested option allows website owners more control over the images in their sitemap, even when using plugins to add images to taxonomies.
Previously, filtering URL images was limited to posts and pages, but we have expanded this functionality to include taxonomies and the homepage. This enhancement provides greater flexibility and empowers developers to optimize their sitemaps easily.
Smaller file size for Yoast SEO Premium
Installing our Premium SEO plugin is now a breeze. We’ve made it even easier by reducing the zip size and removing the free version from the file. Yoast SEO Premium is now around 3MB lighter. This improvement eliminates potential installation issues, ensuring a seamless experience for all.
Update to Yoast SEO 21.9
Maintenance is a crucial aspect of optimizing your website for search engines. It’s also a crucial aspect of developing Yoast SEO. By ensuring improved performance, stability, compatibility, and ongoing support, Yoast SEO helps you stay ahead. Don’t miss out on the benefits of our latest release. Update your Yoast SEO plugin today and advance your SEO efforts.
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2 Responses to Yoast SEO 21.9: Maintenance and more optimizations
gzorzini • 3 months ago
It appears there is a breaking change with this update, as it removes the const `WEBPAGE_HASH` from the `Schema_IDs` class. We were using this in our theme to add a custom graph piece as documented [here](https://developer.yoast.com/features/schema/api/#referencing-other-graph-pieces), but now it’s throwing the `Undefined constant Yoast\WP\SEO\Config\Schema_IDs::WEBPAGE_HASH` error. I’m sure some other plugins and themes use this API, and this update is breaking them. Could you please revert it with a minor update, or at least mention this breaking change in your changelog and remove it from your API docs?
^ Post author
Edwin Toonen • 3 months ago
We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this update has caused. Please be informed that the constant WEBPAGE_HASH within the Schema_IDs class was deprecated as of July 2022. We are ensuring that our documentation no longer mentions the deprecated constant. Also, we’ll add a note to the changelog to inform users about this change and explain the deprecation status. Thank you for bringing this to our attention. We understand the importance of clear communication regarding changes in our updates, and we will strive to improve our notifications and documentation in the future.
It appears there is a breaking change with this update, as it removes the const `WEBPAGE_HASH` from the `Schema_IDs` class. We were using this in our theme to add a custom graph piece as documented [here](https://developer.yoast.com/features/schema/api/#referencing-other-graph-pieces), but now it’s throwing the `Undefined constant Yoast\WP\SEO\Config\Schema_IDs::WEBPAGE_HASH` error. I’m sure some other plugins and themes use this API, and this update is breaking them. Could you please revert it with a minor update, or at least mention this breaking change in your changelog and remove it from your API docs?
We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this update has caused. Please be informed that the constant WEBPAGE_HASH within the Schema_IDs class was deprecated as of July 2022. We are ensuring that our documentation no longer mentions the deprecated constant. Also, we’ll add a note to the changelog to inform users about this change and explain the deprecation status. Thank you for bringing this to our attention. We understand the importance of clear communication regarding changes in our updates, and we will strive to improve our notifications and documentation in the future.