Yoast SEO 22.6 is out today! This release has many performance and quality-of-life fixes to improve your favorite SEO plugin. Plus, we’re asking you to update your PHP versions. Find out what’s new in this post!

Performance enhancements

We’ve upgraded the processing of user metadata in this release, leading to improved performance, especially in generating author sitemaps. Specifically, we now prevent storing non-integral user metadata, making your database leaner and smaller, especially for websites with many backend users. This also means faster, more efficient sitemap output, making your content quicker to index by search engines. It’s a behind-the-scenes enhancement with front-line benefits: better SEO visibility and quicker content discovery for all your author pages.

A better understanding of Arabic and Hebrew

Detecting your keyphrases intelligently in your content is essential to how Yoast SEO functions. We’re always looking for ways to enhance this critical process. 

In Yoast SEO 22.6, we’ve improved the keyphrase detection in SEO titles for Arabic and Hebrew. For example, when the keyphrase is باندا حمراء and the SEO title starts with الباندا الحمراء, we now recognize this as an exact match and give a good result for the keyphrase in SEO title assessment. This will make it easier for you to write better content in those languages. 

Update your PHP versions!

WordPress is changing the minimum requirements for PHP, and Yoast SEO is following suit. To remind users still working with soon-to-be outdated versions of PHP, we’ll notify them in the dashboard. Upgrading your PHP versions comes with many benefits — not to mention a safer, modern environment. We are dropping support for PHP < 7.4 starting November 1st, 2024, so you have time to update in your own time. 

Update to Yoast SEO 22.6

That’s Yoast SEO 22.6 for you. It’s a small but able update that will make the plugin perform better and bring more stability. Don’t forget to update. And don’t forget to upgrade your PHP versions while doing it. See you at the next update!

Edwin Toonen

Edwin is a strategic content specialist. Before joining Yoast, he spent years honing his skill at The Netherlands’ leading web design magazine.