Posted on: April 18, 2025
I wasn’t planning to write an SEO plugin. Honestly, I thought I’d just grab one of the popular ones, toggle a couple of checkboxes, and get on with my life. That was the plan.
But somewhere between the popup ads, the endless upgrade nags, and the plugin deciding it knew more about my site than I did, I snapped. I mean, all I wanted was to set a meta title, a description, and maybe get a sitemap that didn’t look like it was generated by a toaster. That’s not too much to ask, right?
So I did what any frustrated developer does after spending two hours trying to disable a feature that shouldn’t exist in the first place—I built my own. EZ SEO Lite was born, not from ambition or a startup pitch, but from pure stubbornness and a strong cup of coffee.
At its core, EZ SEO Lite does exactly what I needed and nothing more. When I’m editing a post or page, it gives me two simple fields: one for the meta title, one for the description. No wizard, no cluttered sidebar, just the essentials. Once I hit publish, it quietly inserts those tags into the head of the page. If I leave them blank, it falls back to the page title like a civilized plugin should.
Along the way, it tosses in a canonical tag to help with duplicate content. Nothing fancy—just a direct, honest link to where the page lives. And yes, it serves up a basic XML sitemap too. Not one that requires a tutorial or a degree in SEO science. Just a clean list of published posts and pages, automatically available at /sitemap.xml. No config, no shortcode, no “please upgrade to Pro.”
Now, let me be clear: getting here wasn’t exactly graceful. One of the earlier builds happily output multiple title tags, which made my site look like it had a personality disorder. Another version included draft pages in the sitemap, including one called “Delete Me Maybe” that was supposed to be temporary. And I definitely forgot to sanitize the inputs at first, which turned my head section into a flaming mess the moment I copy-pasted a curly quote from Word.
But that’s the beauty of building it myself—I could fix it fast, tailor it to my exact needs, and leave out all the stuff I never asked for in the first place. No ads. No branded dashboard panels. No reminders that I’m missing out on features I never wanted. It just works, and it stays out of my way.
I didn’t build this for mass distribution. I built it because I got tired of bloated plugins solving problems I didn’t have. But after running it on a few of my own projects, I realized there are probably others out there who feel the same way. If that’s you, I’ll happily share it. Just don’t expect a flashy setup wizard or a welcome screen with confetti.
EZ SEO Lite is the kind of plugin that shows up, does the job, and shuts up. And honestly, that’s exactly what I wanted.
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