Yoast SEO WordPress Tutorials and Documentation

PublishPress Capabilities Can Hide Metaboxes, and Any Editor Feature

Written on September 8, 2021.

Back in June, we released “Editor Features” in the PublishPress Capabilities plugin. This allowed you to hide almost any feature on the post editing screen.

Why do I say “almost”? Because the first release of Editor Features could not hide metaboxes.

I'm happy to say that you can now use PublishPress Capabilities to hide metaboxes. This means that when users are writing a post, you can hide ANYTHING that you don't want them to see.

Why would you want to hide features from your users? Some people do this so that the post editing screen is cleaner and less confusing. Other people do this for security and to prevent users from changing some key settings.

How to Hide WordPress Metaboxes in the Post Editor

Written on September 1, 2021.

A WordPress website always starts by looking very clean. But after you choose a theme and install a lot of plugins, the user interface quickly becomes very crowded.

In other guides, we've shown you how to hide WordPress admin menus, hide the admin toolbar, and hide dashboard widgets. In this tutorial, we'll explain how to hide the “metaboxes” that appear below your WordPress posts and in the sidebar, when you're editing a post.

In the image below, you can see some typical metaboxes from Yoast SEO, the PublishPress plugin, TaxoPress, and others.

How to Move Gutenberg Metaboxes To and From the Sidebar

Written on August 12, 2021.

One of our most popular recent posts on this blog explained how to rearrange metaboxes in the Gutenberg editor. This post is useful because the system for moving metaboxes has some confusing points. Yes, you can move some metaboxes up and down, but the default boxes can not be moved. The image below highlights the difference between the default boxes and those added by plugins.

Control Access to Yoast SEO Admin Menus

Written on April 7, 2021.

The Pro version of PublishPress Capabilities allows you to block access to admin menu links in the Yoast SEO plugin. This is useful because Yoast SEO has limited options for managing who can access the admin screens and important features.

Yoast SEO is the most popular WordPress SEO plugin and contains everything that you need to manage your SEO. Yoast SEO is packed full of feature that help search engines to find and understand your website.

When you first install Yoast SEO, you'll see one top-level menu link, plus at least 5 sub-menus:

General
Search Appearance
Social
Tools
Premium

It is possible to control who can access these links by using the PublishPress Capabilities Pro plugin.

After installing PublishPress Capabilities Pro, go to “Capabilities”, then “Admin Menus” in your WordPress admin area:

In the top-left corner of this screen, choose the role that you want to edit. In the image below, I'm going to restrict Yoast SEO access for the “SEO Manager” role.

Scroll down and you can enter a red X for any menu link that you don't want users in the SEO Manager role to access.
Click “Save Changes”.

Now when an SEO Manager logs in to your site, they will not be able to the Yoast SEO menu links that you have blocked:

This approach works for the core Yoast SEO plugin and can also be used for add-on plugins such as Local SEO, WooCommerce SEO, Google News, and more.

WordPress Powered Almost Every Contest in the US Elections

Written on November 9, 2020.

As everyone waited to find out the winners in last week's elections for US president and Congress, one winner was immediately obvious: WordPress.

Earlier in the election cycle, we saw the PublishPress plugin used by more than one presidential candidate. Even so, it was still surprising to see WordPress used in almost every 2020 race, from the presidency to Senate and House seats.

Which USA States Have WordPress Websites?

Written on November 4, 2020.

Here at PublishPress, we’re very focused on the publishing experience in WordPress. We love to see large organizations use WordPress to publish their content.

Across the USA, state governments are among the largest and most high-profile organizations. So I decided to find out which states rely on WordPress to publish their most important updates.

I analyzed the main government sites for all 50 states and found that some of the biggest and most famous states use WordPress.

Featured WordPress Publisher: The Narwhal

Written on August 19, 2020.

Welcome to the first in a regular series where we focus on the very best publishers using WordPress.

We're not always looking for household brand names. We're also searching for publishers who are building new, brave and innovative platforms. That perfectly describes TheNarwhal.ca.

They are a team of investigative journalists who report environmental news and stories in Canada.

Yoast SEO tasks

Written on August 13, 2020.

With the PublishPress Checklists plugin, you can require that site's content meets minimum standards with the Yoast SEO plugin. If the content doesn't meet those standards, you can choose to show a warning, or prevent the post from being published.

Many sites require that their content meets Yoast SEO standards. This helps ensure that their content is optimized for search engines.

The Checklist plugin integrates with the SEO and Readability features in Yoast SEO.

How to use the Yoast SEO tasks

Go to Checklists > Settings. The image below shows the Yoast SEO options.
You can choose from “Disabled, Recommended, or Required” options.
You can choose “Who can ignore this task?“
You can enter choices for both options. Choose either “OK” (yellow/orange) or “Good” (green).

If you enable the Yoast SEO option, they will be visible when you edit content.

If you don't meet the minimum requirements, the checklist items will be shown in red. In the image below, the Readability score is “OK” (yellow/orange) and the SEO analysis score is “Needs improvement” (red).

How to Rearrange WordPress Metaboxes in the Gutenberg Editor

Written on August 11, 2020.

One PublishPress user asked us if it's possible to rearrange metaboxes in Gutenberg.

This users has installed PublishPress Checklists and wanted the checklist area to be at the top of sidebar when writing posts. This image show the move they wanted:

Minimum and Maximum Number of Words in WordPress Posts

Written on August 8, 2020.

Does it matter how many words you write on a topic?

Some books are famously short. “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” barely reaches 60 pages, but it has inspired movies and TV shows for decades.

Some books are famously long. “Moby Dick” is over 700 pages, but it has also been enormously popular for over 100 years.

Tag: Yoast SEO