16.9

Meet Yoast SEO 16.9: This release comes with two new image SEO assessments and improved performance. Happy updating! Read more about what’s new in Yoast SEO 16.9 in our release post!

Enhancements

• Splits the Image alt attributes assessment into two assessments. The Images assessment checks if the page contains at least one image. The Image Keyphrase assessment checks if the images have alt texts, and if those alt texts contain the keyphrase.
• Makes the Transition Word assessment not applicable when the text has less than 200 words, as transition words are less relevant for very short texts.
• Reduces the load time of admin pages, by reducing the number of database queries and optimizing the queries themselves.
• Improves the performance of large posts in the Block editor, Classic editor and Elementor.
• Adds error details to the error message if SEO optimization fails for some unforeseen reason.
• Cleans up indexables for WooCommerce check-out pages from the indexable table, in order to improve performance.
• Adds post link indexing and term link indexing to the wp yoast index WP-CLI command.

Bugfixes

• Fixes a bug where the robots meta tag could have incorrect values if users called the wp_robots filter to set certain values to false. Props to Roy-Orbison.