Slim SEO

What it is

Slim SEO is a WordPress plugin that handles all the technical SEO work a site needs out of the box: meta tags, Open Graph, Twitter cards, JSON-LD schema, XML sitemaps, robots.txt, canonical URLs, redirects. Everything Google needs to index your site properly, nothing more.

The category is "SEO plugins." Most people know Yoast (the long-running incumbent) or RankMath (the upstart). Slim SEO is the third option that nobody markets at you: same outputs, fraction of the weight, made by the same team that builds MetaBox.

How we use it

Install, configure, forget about it

Activate the plugin, set the site name and tagline, pick a default Open Graph image, done. No dashboard to babysit. No "your post needs three more outbound links to score green." Title and meta description fall back to sensible templates per content type. Override per-post when something genuinely needs custom copy.

Schema we control, not theirs

Slim SEO emits basic Organization + WebSite + WebPage schema by default. For our sites, we layer our own JSON-LD on top in plugins/outerwave/includes/schema.php: full LocalBusiness, Service, Article, Review, FAQPage, BreadcrumbList. The two coexist cleanly. Google merges schema from multiple <script type="application/ld+json"> blocks on the same page.

Open Graph image defaults

Slim SEO exposes a default OG image setting. We pre-set it to a brutalist Outerwave wordmark at 1200x630. Per-post override is via the featured image, no extra UI to teach the client. When social previews look right by default, content authors stop worrying about them.

Redirects without a database table per row

Slim SEO ships a simple redirect manager (source URL, destination URL, type). We use it for one-off legacy URL fixes. For pattern-based redirects (whole sections of a legacy site moving to new URL structures), we write PHP in plugins/outerwave/includes/redirects.php: version-controlled, deploy-tested, easy to diff.

Sitemaps that work with our CPTs

The XML sitemap includes posts, pages, and every public custom post type automatically. We don't have to register sitemap endpoints for each new CPT. Sitemap submitted to Google Search Console on launch, regenerated on every publish, never thought about again.

What we deliberately don't use

The keyword research, content score, "readability" features Yoast and RankMath upsell hard on. We don't believe in those features. Writing for humans and matching search intent does the work. A traffic-light widget telling you to add three more instances of your keyword is the SEO equivalent of homeopathy.

What you get

• Every page on your site has proper title, meta description, Open Graph image, and JSON-LD schema by default. Without you touching anything.
• Sitemaps auto-update when content publishes. Submitted to Google and Bing on launch, never thought about again.
• Page weight stays small. Yoast ships ~200KB of admin + frontend JS. Slim SEO ships under 5KB on the frontend.
• No premium tier dangling features in front of you. Everything is in the free plugin.
• No telemetry, no upsell prompts in the admin, no "upgrade to Pro for 50% off!" banners.

Where we don't use it

For e-commerce sites with 10k+ products needing programmatic SEO at scale (template-driven category pages, faceted search indexing, bulk meta-description edits), Yoast Premium's bulk-edit UI saves real time. We'd pay for that workflow if a project genuinely had it.

For agencies running 50+ client sites where centralized analytics across the portfolio is the workflow, RankMath's connected dashboard might justify the install. Not relevant for single-site builds.

For sites where the marketing team is already trained on Yoast and changing tools means retraining everyone, the switching cost can outweigh the page-weight savings. We don't force the switch if there's no real upside.