Publishers who updated to Yoast SEO 19.5 may have encountered unexpected issues. Reports of fatal errors caused by the update began to emerge, though these errors appear to be limited to specific situations.
Yoast SEO Version 19.5
Yoast version 19.5 introduced several changes to enhance user experience, fix a validation issue in the Article structured data, and address some minor bugs. One notable improvement is the Front-end SEO inspector, which provides an overview of posts and various SEO settings like meta tags and structured data. Unfortunately, a bug also surfaced in a particular situation, causing a fatal error. Such errors can occur when there is a conflict between plugins.
Yoast Fatal Error
Eli Schwartz, a search marketing expert and author, tweeted about encountering a fatal error:
"…And this is why I wanted to switch my site. There goes my afternoon as I have to figure out why THIS happened."
In a follow-up tweet, he confirmed:
"Turns out an update from Yoast broke it 😢"
It’s not uncommon for plugin conflicts to cause issues. However, this was not an isolated incident, as others confirmed experiencing the same problem.
"I faced the same issue yesterday when I tried to update one of my new client’s website."
The official Yoast SEO support page on WordPress.org also contained reports of fatal errors.
"I woke up today and tried to access the dashboard of my website and was met with a fatal error. I’m not able to access it through backend nor login. How can I solve this issue?"
Other users reported similar issues:
"Same here. Can’t log in to the backend, and both site and backend throw a fatal error. Saw that Yoast has auto-updated today. Moved both the free and premium versions from the plugins directory to a temporary directory, and now the site is back online."
Another user echoed the same setup, posting:
"Getting a fatal error after the update too. Also have the free version, premium version, and News SEO."
The official Yoast support team apologized and responded:
"We’re sorry that you’re experiencing a fatal error. Thanks for reporting. We’re investigating and it seems to be a problem with the latest update of Yoast SEO while the newest Premium wasn’t released yet. This shouldn’t have happened. We’re looking at getting this resolved as soon as we can by releasing a patch for free and also by releasing Yoast SEO Premium asap. Either should fix the fatal error."
Yoast Responds
The founder of Yoast, Joost de Valk, offered feedback:
"A patch was created quickly by the team indeed and for most sites that resolved it entirely. For some sites, the auto-update mechanism failed to run properly, and therefore those sites didn’t automatically fix themselves. We’ve been discussing this internally a lot as we weren’t happy that this happened at all, and we weren’t happy with how we handled it. We’re all honestly really bummed by it and feel sorry for the sites we’ve broken."
Yoast Identifies the Problem
The issue seemed related to users having both the free and premium versions of the Yoast plugin installed. This situation was cited as the reason for the fatal error. Yoast responded quickly and issued a patch the same day, version 19.5.1.
According to the Yoast SEO WordPress Plugin changelog:
"19.5.1 – Bugfixes: Fixes a bug where a fatal error would be thrown on the front-end when Yoast SEO 19.5 was used with an older version of Yoast SEO Premium."
The Problem is Fixed with Version 19.5.1
Yoast 19.5.1 has resolved the issue for many users. One user commented:
"Update 19.5.1 has corrected the issue."
However, given the multitude of users with various plugin configurations, some edge cases may still experience issues. One user shared their experience of updating from 19.4 directly to 19.5.1 and still encountering problems:
"I went from 19.4 to 19.5.1 and it still broke my site. I don’t think .5.1 fixed the entire issue. I never updated to 19.5. Went straight from 19.4 to 19.5.1. I have Yoast, Yoast premium, and Woo. All other plugins and WP on my site are current. Hope that helps to fix 19.5.1. Glad I never trust auto-update. Not a fan of paying anyone to be a beta tester. Yet this one still got me."
Edge cases are not unusual for updates, and this might be true for Yoast 19.5.1. The root cause seems to be that Yoast published an update for the free version but did not release an update for the premium version simultaneously, leading to a conflict between the two, resulting in a fatal error.
Featured image by Shutterstock/Kues
