Bare Bones SEO WordPress Plugin

The No-Bloat WordPress SEO Settings Tool

Currently in Open Beta (v0.1.3)

Let’s be honest: mainstream WordPress SEO plugins have become bloated, invasive advertisement networks. They fill your dashboard with upsell banners, bog down your page speeds with endless database calls, and try to sell you “premium” upgrades for basic optimization tasks.

Worse yet, WordPress still lacks foundational SEO features right out of the box.
I built Bare Bones SEO to solve this. It is a completely free, single-file plugin designed for agency owners, freelancers, and business owners who care about page speed, technical efficiency, and clean code. It does exactly what you need to optimize your site, and nothing you don’t.

Note: This tool does not give you everything you need to rank. That’s going to come from off-page SEO and your content game. Bare Bones SEO is simply an SEO settings tool for WordPress. It allows you to give instructions to search engines and AI more easily.

What it does (and nothing more)

  • Indexation › A bird’s-eye view of your site’s search footprint. Set index and sitemap rules for every post type, taxonomy, and archive from one board. Page-level settings also available.
  • Page Meta › Titles, descriptions, schema, and indexing for individual posts and pages — editable one at a time in the editor, or in bulk from the dashboard.
  • 301 Redirects › Forward old and dead paths to live pages, with hit counts kept in a rolling 90-day window.
  • 404 Monitor › A passive listener for broken links, filtering out bot probes and vulnerability scans so only real visitor misses are logged.
  • Tracking › Analytics, verification, and pixel snippets for the whole site or a single page, without editing your theme.
  • Zero Performance Tax: No background loops, no database bloat, no third-party tracking scripts, and exactly zero dashboard advertisements. It executes in microseconds.

User Guide & Setup Instructions

To ensure a smooth transition and flawless indexing, follow these steps to deploy the beta on your site.

1. How to Safely Remove Yoast, AIOSEO, or Rank Math

Before activating Bare Bones SEO, you must completely remove existing SEO plugins to avoid duplicate meta tag conflicts (which confuse Google and hurt your rankings).

  1. Log into your WordPress dashboard and navigate to Plugins > Installed Plugins.
  2. Find your current SEO plugin (e.g., Yoast SEO, All in One SEO, or Rank Math).
  3. Click Deactivate, then click Delete.
  4. Pro Tip: If you have custom descriptions saved inside those old plugins, ensure you have copied them down or noted them, as deleting the plugin files completely unhooks their custom data fields.

2. Where and How to Modify Your Titles and Meta Descriptions

Once Bare Bones SEO is activated, you don’t have to look through a maze of separate settings menus. Everything sits right inside the native block editor where you write your content.

  1. Open any Post or Page inside your WordPress editor.
  2. Scroll to the very bottom of the page editor, beneath the main content section.
  3. You will see a clean new control panel titled Custom SEO Settings.
  4. Custom Title Tag: Enter your keyword-optimized title here. Leave it blank if you want WordPress to just use your default page title.
  5. Meta Description: Write your search-snippet summary here (aim for roughly 150-160 characters).
  6. Click Update or Publish on your page. The plugin instantly injects these fresh fields directly into your site’s <head> code for Google to read.

Download the Beta & Join the Footprint

This plugin is open-source and hosted publicly on GitHub. I am actively looking for feedback from fellow marketers and developers to expand this speed-first SEO framework. All you have to do is download the zip file using the button below and upload into your WordPress plugins.

Got feedback, ran into a plugin conflict, etc.? Contact us.