#69 – Joost De Valk on What’s Happening After Yoast

On the podcast today we have Joost De Valk. If you’ve been in the WordPress space for any length of time, it’s likely that you’ve come across the Yoast SEO plugin. This was the brainchild of the guest today, Joost, same pronunciation, different spelling. We talk about how Joost found WordPress and quickly started working on his SEO plugin. How it rapidly grew and became his career. We discuss the WordPress landscape during this time and whether it’s more difficult now to have the type of success that his plugin received, given that there are more players vying for our attention. The conversation then moves into why the plugin was recently sold to Newfold Digital. What were the guardrails that were put in place to ensure that the plugin continued and the employees felt safe? We end up talking about whether it's time for the WordPress Admin area to receive a UI refresh.