Random 404 Errors Caused by Yoast SEO

Hello,

My company isn’t currently paying for any of your premium plugins, but we are having a very serious technical issue caused by Yoast SEO that I want to bring to your attention.

We’re in the process of building a large publishing platform that will be going live the end of this year. We’ve always had the free version of Yoast SEO installed, and for most of that time it was not causing any problems.

A few months ago our platform started to be plagued by random 404 errors. Almost any page of our platform could suddenly 404 for no apparent reason. This was occurring randomly and often.

We spent weeks trying to pin down the cause and finally discovered it was Yoast SEO. When we have Yoast enabled this problem happens consistently. When Yoast is disabled the problem completely disappears. We have verified this over long periods of testing time.

Our platform is setup at AWS and we have a complex infrastructure (CloudFront, Docker, etc.). To be honest I’m not sure why our infrastructure would be related, but I am mentioning it just in case. We’re running php 7.4.x and all of our software (WordPress core, etc.) is up to date.

As I said this problem manifests itself as random 404s when accessing almost any page of the platform. It is such a serious problem that we may have to completely abandon the use of Yoast. I’d much rather have the problem solved, as otherwise we’ll have to custom code our own SEO solution.

Yoast is a large plugin, and trying to understand the cause of this issue is like finding a needle in a haystack. This is why I am brining it to your attention, in the hope that we can work together to find the cause. I can’t grant you access to our application, but I can work together with you jointly to help find the cause.

Please let me know what you think…

~ Michael