We’ve got great feedback for our free Schema plugin since it was first launched back in 2016. It’s super exciting to notice a jump in plugin active installs stats,based on wordpress.org plugin stats, Schema has reached the 20,000+ active plugin installs mark. It has been downloaded more than 100,000 times, and still counting.
Here is some important updates about the plugin.
Version 1.6.9.4 highlights
Today, we’ve released an update with several bug fixes and cool new features to make Schema more awesome than ever. Let’s break down the main features included in this release.
1- Breadcrumbs BreadcrumbList JSON-LD
Thanks to the JSON-LD Breadcrumbs , we’ve been able to add support for breadcrumbs markup (BreadcrumbList), and made it play nicely with Yoast SEO plugin as well as Genesis Framework (both currently outputs breadcrumb markup in RDFa format). So, now Schema is able to output breadcrumbs markup in JSON-LD format, the most recommended by Google.
Schema plugin outputs schema.org markup only in json-ld format, so practically there is no output on the front-end, this maybe something to be considered in future updates if we’ve been asked for it.
We prefer to keep Schema working behind the scenes -in the backend- and try to avoid outputting anything on the front-end of a website. So, we are more into integrate Schema with other plugins rather than inventing the wheel.
You can still use the awesome Yoast SEO breadcrumb, or any other plugin to display it on your site. Also, Genesis Framework and many other WordPress themes has its own breadcrumbs, however most of them will output currently output in RDFa.
A good theme will provide a way to disable or remove attributes and markups in an easy way, this could be via a simple setting, or with the help of a filter.
Let’s take a look at the settings:
Once you get Schema version 1.6.9.4 installed on your website, a new setting to enable breadcrumbs will show in the plugin settings, under the Content tab. By enabling this feature, you are telling the plugin to cehck:
- If Yoast SEO is installed and breadcrumbs is enabled, then remove its schema.org RDFa output.
- If Genesis is installed and breadcrumbs is enabled, then remove its schema.org RDFa output.
- Outputs breadcrumbs in json-ld format.
2- Taxonomy archives support
In this release, we’ve added support for taxonomy archive pages, the plugin will generate schema.org markup for taxonomy archive pages on the fly to provide more details to search engines.
3- Make Schema faster
Schema plugin looks pretty simple, but it does some heavy lifting in the back scenes, which requires additional database queries to get the necessary data for markup. However, we’ve been able to figure out a way to store the output in post meta, then simply call it when needed without having to overload the server, so this issue has been solved in earlier releases (here is a breakdown of how this works), but some other parts were not taken care of prior to version 1.6.9.4.
For example, the markup for Category archives was created on the fly on every website visit to any category archive page. This wasn’t a comfortable thing to us, so we focused on performance and changed the way we pull the data. Now, the plugin gets the necessary data from post meta field directly, this resulted in saving 4 database queries since we no longer need to run several functions when someone view a category archive page on the site. This is also the case for taxonomy archive pages, it’s also fast and lightweight.
We hope you will like this update and find it useful.
