Free WordPress Plugin: SEO Excerpt Shortcode Remover

We absolutely love the Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress – it’s literally the best! We use it on every site we build, maintain or optimise.

We also love the WP Page Bakery Page Builder as it makes editing pages much easier and more flexible for our customers. The two work together very well… apart from one thing!

This isn’t just applicable to Page Bakery by the way, this also happens with the other editors such as Divi and Elementor.

Yoast has an awesome feature called Search Appearance whereby you can set templates for your Meta Title and Description as a fall-back for dynamic pages, or ones that you haven’t got around to writing them for yet.

The most common way of doing the descriptions is with the %excerpt% tag. This takes the start of the page content and uses that as a description. Yes – a bespoke description is better, but remember this is a fallback and perfect for sites that have thousands of user generated pages for instance.

The Problem

Page builders work by inserting shortcodes into the text – [column] for instance. These tell the page builder how the site should look. Unfortunately these are then put into the excerpt too…

The Solution

Our super tiny plugin takes those shortcodes out 🙂 leaving you with an excerpt that can be used for the search engines.

How to get this great free SEO plugin

It’s available for free via this link but will soon be listed on the WordPress plugin directory too.