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Editing screens *extremely* slow to load with ACF Flexible Content and Yoast SEO

  • My theme, which I am now using on dozens of client sites, is highly dependent on ACF Flexible Content fields… to the point that I would consider it a critical element of my business.

    I have been noticing lately that editing pages that have a large number of Flexible Content blocks are extremely slow to load. Not the front end — that’s fine. Just the editing screens.

    I’ve pegged the combination of ACF Flexible Content blocks and Yoast SEO as the problem. I have a page with 16 Flexible Content blocks on it, and the editing screen loads in 4 seconds with Yoast turned off, but it takes 17 seconds if Yoast is on.

    Last year I had switched away from Yoast to The SEO Framework for unrelated reasons, but then I switched back to Yoast because I was experiencing this slow loading problem with The SEO Framework. Now, I’m experiencing it with Yoast! I just tested the same page using The SEO Framework instead, and it only took 5 seconds to load.

    I’m happy switching to The SEO Framework, but given that Yoast is the dominant SEO plugin, I’m wondering if anyone else has run into this issue, or if anyone has a suggestion for improving load times for Yoast on pages with lots of Flexible Content blocks.

  • I have exactly the same problem, I built a kind of page builder with ACF Flexible Content Fields and I have ridiculously long loading times on the admin edit page where Yoast SEO plugin is activated.

    Does anyone found a solution for this issue ? I’ve been digging a bit and it seems that the problem comes from the “Schema” tab in the Yoast SEO module. But didn’t find a way to deactivate it without breaking the whole thing…

  • Thank you for your answer, I tried to downgrade Yoast SEO to 13.4.1 and that solved the problem so we are just waiting for a fix from them.

  • I do recommend considering The SEO Framework as an alternative to Yoast. I find Yoast’s self-promotion really obnoxious, and it has a ton of features that I don’t ever use. The SEO Framework is a lot more focused and I prefer the way its configuration is set up.

    I’ve been moving all of my clients’ sites from Yoast to The SEO Framework as they run into this issue.

  • I can almost agree with using SEO Framework, but the last time I used it I had to do a lot of custom coding to allow altering title and description meta tags on archive pages where yoast does it natively. When I talked to the devs for SEO framework they did not seem interested in building this in. I also needed to use a separate plugin for sitemaps that do not work nearly as well because they put all of the links in a single file which does not work on sites with thousands of pages because google has a limit to the number of links it will read in a single sitemap.xml file.

    That was over a year ago, has any of the above changed?

  • Most of the sites I build with WP don’t have a blog component, so they’re not dealing with category archives or thousands of URLs, so I’m not the best to speak to this. It doesn’t look to me like it does either of these things yet.

  • 🙂 No problem, was just curious if you might know. I build sites that have custom products, no ecom so I don’t use WC and my clients want to be able to SEO the product categories and other custom taxonomies that need to be built. Building customization for SEO is not an issue with sites I build but it can be a huge issue when a client is using some craptastic theme they’ve picked up somewhere and I have to find a way to customize it. It seems that Yoast also causes the admin to crap out when there are thousands of posts and not just when there are a lot of custom fields.

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