WPML SEO 2.2.0 – Smarter Multilingual SEO Features and Improvements

We just released WPML SEO 2.2.0 with new improvements that make managing multilingual SEO easier and more efficient – whether you’re using Yoast SEO or Rank Math SEO.

WPML SEO 2.2.3 Is Now Available

Since publishing this post, we’ve released WPML SEO 2.2.3, which includes fixes for a few newly-reported issues.

New Features and Improvements

Meta Title and Description Length Control

When using automatic translation, WPML now makes sure that translated meta titles and descriptions stay within the recommended length for each language. Since text length can vary between languages, this ensures your SEO fields remain optimal across your multilingual site.

This feature is now available for:

Yoast SEO
Rank Math SEO
All in One SEO

We’re also working with Slim SEO and SEOPress to bring this feature to their plugins soon.

SEO Placeholders in Automatic Translation

Automatic translation now preserves all SEO placeholders.

No more worries about placeholders being accidentally modified or removed in translated meta fields.

Alternative Languages (Hreflangs) Tags in Sitemaps

We’ve added alternative language (hreflang) tags directly into sitemaps.

This improves SEO and simplifies your site’s HTML, as pages no longer need hreflang tags in the <head> section.

Note: This change is only visible in the XML source.

If you open your sitemap in a browser, you won’t see the hreflang tags in the human-readable view. This is expected. To confirm the tags are there, view the page source – you will see the hreflang tags correctly included in the raw XML.

Translate Taxonomy Term Meta Data (Yoast SEO)

You can now translate meta data for taxonomy terms when using Yoast SEO. This allows better SEO optimization across categories, tags, and custom taxonomies.

To translate meta data for your taxonomy terms, go to WPML → Translation Management, expand the Yoast SEO section, select the Term Meta item, and send it for translation.

Other Improvements in This Release

Yoast SEO

Fixed the language in news sitemaps generated by the “WP SEO News” addon.
Improved sitemap generation by checking if a term is indexable before adding it.
Refactored first links in sitemaps to fix pagination bugs.
Fixed the WooCommerce shop page URL in the sitemap.
Added support for sitemap caching (disabled by default; enabled automatically in themes like Divi).
Improved performance by restricting home_url filters to sitemaps.
Improved performance by removing unnecessary flushing of WPML’s convert-url cache on every request.
Fixed an edge case issue with breadcrumb titles for categories after updates.

Rank Math SEO

Synced the primary category to translations.
Filtered sitemaps by language in language-per-domain setups.
Filtered language-specific URLs in HTML sitemaps.

Ready to Update?

We’re rolling out this release gradually but you can update your site manually right away:

In your site’s admin, go to Plugins → Add New Plugin and click the Commercial tab
Click to check for updates
WPML SEO 2.2.0 will appear on the list, and you can update to it

If you have any questions or feedback, feel free to leave us a comment below. We’d love to hear what you think!