{"id":10289,"date":"2017-11-29T02:17:41","date_gmt":"2017-11-29T08:17:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.siteground.com\/blog\/?p=10289"},"modified":"2025-09-18T14:40:51","modified_gmt":"2025-09-18T14:40:51","slug":"web-craft-masters-yoast-websites","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.siteground.com\/blog\/web-craft-masters-yoast-websites\/","title":{"rendered":"Web Craft Masters: How Yoast\u2019s Founder Built a Product Used on Millions of Websites"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

At SiteGround, we have the pleasure to host tens of thousands of businesses by remarkable entrepreneurs. They have great stories worth sharing and they’re all masters of their own craft. We are starting a series of interviews where we’ll feature how they got to where they are today. We hope their stories will inspire you to explore new ideas or methods in your own projects!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you are a WordPress user, you have most probably used the popular Yoast SEO plugin<\/span><\/a>, created by Joost de Valk<\/span><\/a>, founder and CEO of Yoast. He is a developer, SEO specialist, and online marketer, actively involved in the WordPress community. For the start of our interview series, there\u2019s no better person than Joost. We\u2019re talking with him about SEO, his interesting story, and other different topics, so read on for what turned out to be an amazing interview!
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You started Yoast<\/span><\/a> 7 years ago as a hobby while working as an SEO and marketing consultant. Yoast has grown tremendously and it currently serves millions of websites. At which moment did it become so huge and why do you think it\u2019s still the most popular SEO tool among WordPress users?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Joost<\/strong>: I created the company 7 years ago, but I started building WordPress plugins around 2006. Only about 6 years ago I really made one \u201cWordPress SEO plugin\u201d, later renamed Yoast SEO. This wasn\u2019t the plan I had when I started the company. When I started Yoast, I was convinced I\u2019d be freelancing all my life, not hiring any employees. That changed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At some point, my wife said, \u201cWhat you\u2019re doing, all that support for WordPress SEO, in your spare time, is unsustainable.\u201d She was right, as she often is. So I started developing premium extensions, first Video SEO<\/span><\/a>, and later on, Yoast SEO Premium<\/span><\/a>. People turned out to be willing to pay, and Yoast has been growing ever since.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As to why it\u2019s still popular – because we keep making it better, we keep developing, we keep up to date with Google\u2019s changes. We basically take away a large part of the work that technical SEO would be for site owners.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At Yoast, you have experience consulting<\/span> companies like Facebook, eBay, The Guardian. How did that happen and what have you learned from your experience with consulting tech giants?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Joost<\/strong>: I\u2019ve been in the large-site, corporate SEO world for over a decade. I started my career at an agency in the Netherlands where I was fortunate enough to work with some of the biggest brands in the Netherlands and learn the trade. Later on, as I was getting better and better at what I did and blogged about it, people started asking me for projects.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Guardian, where I was responsible for the SEO part of the domain name change of guardian.co.uk to theguardian.com, was arguably one of the biggest projects I\u2019ve ever had. It was also, as Google called it, the single largest domain migration they\u2019d ever seen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It went pretty smooth, without the usual traffic dip you see in those migrations. That led to more people wanting to hire me. Most of that was me though, which didn\u2019t really scale. So in the last few years, we\u2019ve decided to not do consulting anymore and focus on developing Yoast SEO.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How is bringing a product to the WordPress market different today than it was back when you started? What\u2019s your advice to people looking to follow in your footsteps?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Joost<\/strong>: Just try it! Start building something that\u2019s awesome. Think about your marketing model for a long time. Freemium is the easiest model by far for WordPress because the WordPress.org plugin repository can give you so many users so quickly. If you build something that makes people\u2019s lives easier, they\u2019ll often be willing to reward you for it later on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For freemium to work, you need a pretty big group of users. I don\u2019t think many products will ever get above 1-1.5% of free users converting to premium in the WordPress space. So you need 1,000 free users to get 10-15 paid users. That means your free product must be good, and your premium product must offer a good value-add on top of that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You\u2019ve recently started a campaign to help and motivate people to upgrade from old PHP versions, an initiative that SiteGround supports<\/span><\/a> too. Could you explain why the newer PHP version is more beneficial to the clients? In your opinion, why don\u2019t most hosting companies proactively upgrade their clients to newer PHP versions?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Joost<\/strong>: Updating PHP is hard, at least, that\u2019s how people conceive it. But the gains are tremendous. A site that goes from PHP 5.2 to PHP 7 can easily become twice as fast, sometimes even four times faster than before. Nothing else you can do to your site will get you that kind of speed boost without an additional cost.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

People (and hosts) are afraid that their software will break when they upgrade their PHP. They\u2019re afraid that plugins won\u2019t work, for instance. So far, in what we\u2019ve seen, most people can upgrade without any work. It\u2019s fairly trivial to test it, if you have cPanel access, on most hosts, you can just change it and see if your site still works. I\u2019d say: go for it. Try it!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Let\u2019s talk hosting, almost a year ago you decided to move to SiteGround Enterprise<\/span><\/a>. How do you like the experience so far, and which part of the SiteGround services have you been most impressed with?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Joost<\/strong>: We love it. No other words for it. The SiteGround team that assists us and our team basically operate as one team. We have a pretty big setup:<\/p>\n\n\n\n