Dirigible SEO is light on your site.
We’ve used various SEO plugins over the years, but most of them are for SEO beginners who need handholding or who can’t code. At Dirigible Studio, we use a variety of specialized tools, including SEM Rush*, Google Search Console, and Google Keyword Planner to research and plan our content strategy. Our team writes and polishes our content long before the copy is placed. Although it’s possible to use WordPress as a composing tool, it’s not always practical. So using a huge SEO plugin is unnecessary for our workflow and overkill for our websites.
For example, Yoast is 10.6 MB. Dirigible SEO is just 31kb. Yes, Yoast is 34,200% **larger. Since we’re already using a different sitemap generator, using Yoast is like bringing a cannon to a knife fight. Sure, your cannon is great and all, but while you’re taking the time to load that thing, someone else has already found 50 different ways to wield that blade.
As far as speed goes, accurately gauging the exact performance difference is tough. The amount of code that executes on any given WordPress site is incredibly variable, and all that variability impacts performance in different ways. In our tests, our backend loads about 25% faster with Dirigible SEO, and our front-end loads about 10% faster. While editing a page, we were getting 207 DB calls with Yoast compared to 163 DB calls with Dirigible SEO (a decrease of about 40, or 22%), and on the front-end, we saw a decrease of 4-6 when making the switch (which, for our sites, is about a 6% difference).
On our local test install that we use as a basis for all of our sites, using Dirigible SEO instead of Yoast shaves about 0.88 seconds off the load time. And load time is a leading SEO signal. We get it—Yoast does a ton of stuff and is loaded with features. But Dirigible SEO is for those of you who need to manage SEO, not manage a plugin.