Version 2.6.21 of the Search Atlas WordPress Plugin includes two meaningful improvements to help you manage your site's SEO more efficiently, along with a set of fixes that resolve caching, indexing, and syncing issues some sites were experiencing.

## **✨ What's New**

This release adds two improvements to your WordPress experience:

- **Sitemap zero-URL warning:** The Sitemap Settings screen now displays a clear warning when a generated News or Video sitemap contains zero URLs. This makes it easy to tell at a glance whether an empty sitemap is intentional or the result of a misconfiguration.
- **SEO columns in Posts and Pages lists:** You can now enable optional SEO Title, Meta Description, Noindex, and Nofollow columns directly in your WordPress Posts and Pages admin list. These columns are hidden by default and can be turned on through the Screen Options panel at the top of each list screen.

## **🛠️ How to Use It**

1. To see the new SEO columns, go to your WordPress admin and open either the **Posts** or **Pages** list.
2. Click **Screen Options** in the top-right corner of the screen.
3. Check the boxes for **SEO Title**, **Meta Description**, **Noindex**, and/or **Nofollow** to add them to your list view.
4. To check your sitemap health, navigate to the **Sitemap Settings** screen and look for any zero-URL warnings on your News or Video sitemaps.

## **📋 What to Expect**

This release also resolves several issues that were affecting site performance, indexing accuracy, and publishing reliability:

- **Improved caching behavior:** A redundant HTTP header was being added to responses, which could cause some CDN caches to bypass their edge cache and send every visitor directly to your server. This has been removed, so your CDN should now cache pages as expected.
- **Faster page cache population and accurate PageSpeed scores:** Background requests used to warm your page cache and run performance audits were previously being slowed down by the plugin's rendering process. This caused some sites' caches to not fully populate and made PageSpeed scores appear lower than they actually were. Both now run without interference.
- **Accurate SEO Health dashboard readings:** The SEO Health dashboard was sometimes displaying the plugin's own default SEO title and description instead of the values you had set yourself. It now correctly reflects the title and description that actually appear on your published pages.
- **Reliable publishing and syncing on restricted sites:** Sites using a security plugin or custom code to restrict REST API access to logged-in users only were experiencing silent failures during publishing and syncing. This has been resolved and those actions now work correctly on restricted sites.
- **Noindex behavior is now consistent:** A scenario where a Noindex directive set through the page meta box could be silently ignored when advanced robots settings were also present has been fixed. The Robots settings have also been simplified — the redundant Index checkbox has been removed, and noindex output now only includes indexing and crawling directives.
- **No more errors when importing robots settings from Yoast:** Importing advanced robots meta data from Yoast SEO no longer causes a fatal error when the stored value is in an unexpected format.

If you need further assistance, open the chat widget in the bottom-right corner of the platform and type **human teammate** to be connected with a member of our team.