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Yoast internal linking and poor plugin performance

Recently I’ve worked on a couple of sites that use the Yoast SEO plugin and both were having instances where loading the post editor crashed my browser. On an MD site this is nearly unheard of and even the Blocks Editor isn’t THAT slow!

It wasn’t long before I discovered the slowdown was coming from Yoast and its new “Internal linking” meta box, maybe you’ve seen it too if you still use Yoast:

The promise of this feature is fairly obvious—to help you find articles to link to within your current post, probably using some “smart AI technology”. To achieve this from a development standpoint it probably looks at minimum two things:

  1. Parse the current post content
  2. Compare arbitrary keywords to other content in database

These are both expensive operations on their own, especially for long posts and a database with thousands of posts, and based on how it performs and how useless the results actually have been I can only wonder what in the world were they thinking to implement something like this?

My only conclusion is the Yoast team got tired of hearing the valid criticism that their plugin is full of ads so they had to add something shiny and seemingly valuable to make it look like their plugin does more things. If further slowing down your site was their goal then this is beautifully designed!

I hate to be a hater but when I see features like this with such little added value for such massive performance hits I can only assume dishonest intentions and this further seals the deal in my mind why Yoast SEO is no longer the best solution on the market.

In case you’re wondering, I stopped recommending Yoast SEO years ago in favor of the brilliantly lightweight and the “it just works” plugin called The SEO Framework.

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I've been using The SEO Framework for over a year and it's been flawless.

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I move to seo framework now thanks to your recommendation.
But i must remove my yoast breadcrumbs.
Any luck with MD standalone breadcrumbs @Alex ?

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I move to seo framework now thanks to your recommendation.
But i must remove my yoast breadcrumbs.
Any luck with MD standalone breadcrumbs @Alex ?

Great call, did you notice any SEO/ranking changes when you made the move? Just a curiosity.

Great question, one thing I quietly added into MD5.2.1 for the Docs Dropin is a breadcrumbs template to the MD templates folder. It doesn't cover the full range of pages in WordPress but it can be expanded upon quite easily.

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Great call, did you notice any SEO/ranking changes when you made the move? Just a curiosity.

I don't see any ranking effect yet since i migrated to seo framework just yesterday. It may take few weeks to see some ranking changes i guess. But i noticed a much faster loading page while editing some posts.

Great question, one thing I quietly added into MD5.2.1 for the Docs Dropin is a breadcrumbs template to the MD templates folder. It doesn't cover the full range of pages in WordPress but it can be expanded upon quite easily.

So can i add this breadrumbs to my regular posts without the docs dropin?

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Glad to hear your honest opinion about Yoast. They used to be an excellent company, but over the years I've also started to dislike new features and redesign of their plugin. Especially for the price point.

I'll also consider switching to the SEO framework. Ill try to see if the free version gives me some insight into their view on SEO in WP.

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So can i add this breadrumbs to my regular posts without the docs dropin?

I wouldn't recommend it just yet as it needs a little more built into it but I will let you know when that is possible sooner than later.

Glad to hear your honest opinion about Yoast. They used to be an excellent company, but over the years I've also started to dislike new features and redesign of their plugin. Especially for the price point.

It's hard not to be when it has been such a performance drag on so many websites. For an industry leader it is important to call out and I hope it can become better for it. SEO Framework is performance first, and I don't see any compromises on that.

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