I’ve been running Yoast SEO on this site for a very long time. It is a feature rich and powerful plugin and has been one of the first I’ve installed on all my blogs. Besides allowing me to configure the SEO settings, one feature I enjoyed is the readability analysis.
But, over the years, the plugin has it has also grown in size and included ads and notifications. I have generally not minded these and understand the need to monetize. However, when you delete a post or almost anything else, the plugin displays an annoying notification. It prompts you to install the premium version of Yoast SEO to redirect the deleted content.
I could live with this for a long time. However, the final straw came today as I spent a good portion of today going through my very old posts, cleaning and deleting them. I’ve mass deleted a lot of posts that were no longer relevant and plan to continue pruning this site. While doing so, I kept encountering the prompt I mentioned above. The fact that I don’t need all the features – I don’t think I even know all that Yoast SEO offers – made it easier to switch.
Enter The SEO Framework
I’ve had my eye out for alternative SEO plugins. Yet, having to migrate all the data stopped me from making any changes.
One such plugin is The SEO Framework (TSF). Sybre Waaijer is the author of TSF and he designed it to be simple and clean which is what attracted me the most. The excellent reviews also helped firm up my decision.
Migrating to TSF was surprisingly easy. The SEO Data Transporter plugin allows you to easily migrate the Yoast SEO data to TSF.
I followed this guide to ensure I didn’t miss anything. The overall process took me less than 30 minutes. I’ve gone through the various settings and made minimal tweaks.
Grammarly and Hemmingway
As mentioned above, I used Yoast SEO’s readability analysis while drafting posts. Over the past year, I have been using Grammarly to sense check what I compose. It’s very helpful to fix the basic typos and sentence structure. Combined with Hemmingway, I can fully replace this Yoast SEO feature.
Sitemaps
TSF has its own sitemaps feature which seems to work well. I will keep an eye out for anything untoward in my Google Search Console.
Other sites
If I’m happy with the performance of The SEO Framework, I will install it on my other sites, especially WebberZone.
Having composed this post across Hemingway and Grammarly combined with monitoring the results in TSF, I’m pleased so far.
