If you run a WordPress website, then you’re probably familiar with the Yoast SEO plugin by Joost de Valk. Not only is it a fantastic plugin for helping improve the SEO of your site, it also has some great extra features such as Page Analysis, XML Sitemaps and Social Integration. Whenever you hear people talk about which SEO plugin to use on their site, nine times out of ten people will simply recommend Yoast SEO.
Over the years, they’ve introduced various adverts in the settings pages and typically I don’t have and issue with this sort of thing, especially when it’s a free plugin. Recently though, they’ve introduce a new notification after the plugin is updated.
The message indicates that it will tell you what’s been updated in the latest version, when in fact, it simply takes you to a full ‘About’ page with a list of features for that major version release (in this case, for version 2.3).
Now, as I said above, normally I don’t have too much of an issue with notifications like this, especially when they’re dismissable. However, there’s a few annoying features with this particular notification. First up, it doesn’t simply disappear when the page is refreshed, like a lot of these types of notifications. Secondly, and more annoyingly, is that it will display for every single Administrator on your site. So, no matter who updates the plugin, every Admin user will get the notification.
When you’re maintaining sites for your clients, this becomes a real annoyance as you don’t necessarily want those users to be inundated with plugin update notifications when you’re handling the updates for them. Also, as it is at the moment, the plugin will actually show multiple notifications on the screen at once, if they’re not cleared each time. This latter issue is one that I’ve raised with the developers and will hopefully get addressed soon. Unfortunately though, they aren’t interested in stopping the notification from displaying to all Admin users.
Since I’m not wanting to login as every Admin user on every site I’m maintaining, just to clear the notification, I’ve written a short bit of code that will automatically clear it for you when the plugin is updated, or activated. Pretty sweet eh!
Simply add the following to your functions.php file and you should be set! No more Yoast nag!
Let me know in the comments if you’ve found this helpful or if you know of any other plugins that display annoying nags.
