Yoast SEO 22.6 is available today! This version includes many performance and quality of life fixes to improve your favorite SEO plugin. We also ask you to update your PHP versions. Find out what's new in this post!

Performance improvements

We've updated user metadata processing in this release, resulting in improved performance, particularly when creating author sitemaps. Specifically, we now prevent the storage of non-integrated user metadata, making your database leaner and smaller, especially for sites with many backend users. This also means faster and more efficient sitemap output, allowing your content to be indexed by search engines more quickly. It's a behind-the-scenes improvement with immediate benefits: better SEO visibility and faster content discovery for all your author pages.

A better understanding of Arabic and Hebrew

Intelligently identifying your keywords in your content is crucial to how Yoast SEO works. We are always looking for ways to improve this important process.

In Yoast SEO 22.6, we improved key phrase detection in Arabic and Hebrew SEO titles. For example, if the key phrase is باندا حمراء and the SEO title starts with الباندا الحمراء, we will now recognize this as an exact match and give the key phrase a good score in the SEO title evaluation. This will make it easier for you to write better content in these languages.

Update your PHP versions!

WordPress is changing the minimum requirements for PHP and Yoast SEO is following suit. To remind users that they are still working with soon-to-be-deprecated PHP versions, we notify them in the dashboard. Upgrading your PHP versions brings many benefits – not to mention a more secure, modern environment. We're ending support for PHP < 7.4 starting November 1, 2024, giving you time to upgrade at your own pace.

Update to Yoast SEO 22.6

This is Yoast SEO 22.6 for you. It is a small but nice update that improves the performance of the plugin and ensures more stability. Don't forget to update. And don't forget to update your PHP versions as well. See you in the next update!