Once There Was Yoast – Then we needed lightweight

I used to use Yoast, it was fantastic, all the great tools to help me make my clients awesome. Then I found WPMUDEV and their collection of tools build by Devs for Devs with development in mind. So I started using BOTH Yoast and Smart Crawl on all our accounts, mostly for the different ways that the tools look at things and because some of our clients with marketing people found Smart Crawl less confusing and easier to use.

We did that for about 6 months before canceling most of our Yoast subscriptions and using only SC from WPMUDEV’s plugin repository. It’s not just about the cost, paying one price a month for everyone’s sites, it’s also about the “straight to the point” UX, there’s nothing confusing, nothing else to add in order to get full use, it was also about the weight of Smart Crawl compared to Yoast and it’s add-ons. When truly concerned with SEO and not just trying to be flashy for a client, you need lightweight, feather touch tracking, sitemaps that use a standardized URL instead of the Yoast sitemaps URLs and content that I swear the crawler hates… always so many errors with Yoast’s fancy sitemaps compared to the Smart Crawl sitemaps that never seem to have any issues or include stuff that is not beneficial to our indexing.

Note: I’m not a specialist on that subject, and not particularly sure why replacing Yoast completely seemed to improve our indexing and decrease our crawl errors. All I know is that it did, if you want to learn specifically why it did, I would suggest swinging by the WPMUDEV support page and chat up the Support Heroes about it, those guys are fantastic and always patient with teaching you how stuff works, you know not just saying “do this”, but actually giving you the tools to expand your skills and understanding.

Smart Crawl, you got me position 0, repeatedly, will you marry me