How to Remove Extra Yoast SEO Columns

Removing the extra columns from the WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin can help unclutter your WordPress admin Post and Page listings administrative screens. It’s surprisingly simple to remove the SEO, SEO Title, Meta Desc., and Focus KW columns from your post listings screen:

Simply select “Screen Options” top right and untick checkboxes next to the unwanted columns.

Here is a simple screencast on how to remove the extra columns added by the WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin:

That’s it. I always seem to forget using Screen Options when trying to change modifications introduced by a plugin. I hope this simple post and video help you to remove the extra keyword columns added by the Yoast SEO plugin.

Addendum:

I have to mention, that this is primarily a method for hiding the extra Yoast plugin SEO columns from a user perspective. If you’re a theme developer or want a more robust solution (actually removing the columns from code and not simply hiding their display), you would do something like what you find in this post:

• How to Disable WordPress SEO Admin Columns

Here’s an excerpt from the post above:

You can hide any unwanted admin columns through the screen options menu, but this won’t actually remove them. It’s just a bit of JS and CSS trickery to stop them from displaying.

A note about WordPress: it can get confusing as a WordPress user as to the proper way to handle options at times. The “Screen Options” tab option to take care of this issue literally escaped me for months. I was checking SEO > Settings, trying to think of a functions.php hook. Everything. Finally, it hit me to check the Screen Options (which is a different option view then the Plugin’s own options screen). Maybe if a plugin has an Options Screen, WordPress should automatically insert a “Screen Options” sub-link just in case it is used so that it can come to the attention of a user.