Skip to main content

Yoast SEO: Install using Composer

Composer is the PHP dependency manager. If you run a Composer-managed WordPress site, you can pull Yoast SEO and Yoast SEO Premium in as Composer dependencies.

Working on Yoast SEO itself rather than consuming it? See the contributor setup instead.

Requirement: your project must register a Composer autoloader​

The Composer-distributed Yoast SEO package does not ship its own vendor/autoload.php. Yoast SEO's classes are loaded through your project's root autoloader, which must be registered before WordPress loads plugins. In practice this means a line equivalent to:

require_once __DIR__ . '/vendor/autoload.php';

before require ABSPATH . 'wp-settings.php'; runs. Most Composer-managed WordPress stacks already do this; if yours doesn't, add it (in wp-config.php, in your scaffold's pre-WP bootstrap file, or via a small must-use plugin).

If no autoloader is registered, Yoast SEO will detect this on the first admin request, display a "plugin installation is incomplete" notice and self-deactivate.

Yoast SEO​

From the root of your Composer-managed WordPress project:

composer require yoast/wordpress-seo

The package is routed to wp-content/plugins/wordpress-seo/.

Yoast SEO Premium​

Premium is distributed via Yoast's private Composer repository at https://my.yoast.com/packages/. You will need a Composer install token from your MyYoast account.

composer config -g http-basic.my.yoast.com token <your-token>
composer config repositories.my-yoast composer https://my.yoast.com/packages/
composer require yoast/wordpress-seo-premium

This installs Yoast SEO Premium and Yoast SEO (which Premium depends on) into wp-content/plugins/. Premium relies on the same project-level autoloader as Yoast SEO — see the requirement above.

Updating​

composer update

Composer tracks the resolved state in composer.lock. Commit composer.lock so every environment installs the same versions.

caution

Updating Composer dependencies is a delicate process and may introduce regressions. Always test before committing an updated composer.json / composer.lock.