Please consider adding default structed data for pages & posts. Perhaps use WebPage and Article schema. Do not rely on the user to set these up.

If your plugin had done that, I wouldn’t have had the problem I’ll describe below.

We had been using Yoast SEO (free) for schema and had pretty decent rankings for years. We hired an SEO agency who told us we needed to add Organization schema. The Organization schema added by Yoast doesn’t get picked up correctly by the Schema Markup Validator and the Rich Results Test tool.

To remedy that and some other structured data issues, we installed Schema & Structured Data for WP & AMP about 6 months ago.

I went through the setup wizard and followed the documentation as best I could and I thought we were good to go.

Now, 6 months later, I’m trying to diagnose why our business has slowed down. I discovered one of our previously top-performing pages had a dramatic drop in organic traffic almost immediately after we installed your plugin.

It used to consistently rank in the top 3 results. Now it is in position 15-20.

I noticed the search results show the publish date for the page, which is 4 years ago. I thought that was strange because we use the WP Last Modified Info plugin to define the last modified date. We also publish the last modified date on the front end of the page. The page is regularly updated and was last modified 2 months ago.

To troubleshoot the issue, I disabled your plugin. This caused schema to be added to the page by Yoast. Yoast added WebPage schema with a dateModified attribute.

I re-enabled your plugin and reviewed the schema added to the page. I found:

• The page only had ItemList (VideoObject), SiteNavigationElement, and BreadcrumbList schema.
• There was no WebPage or Article schema.
• The dateModified attribute wasn’t added to the schema.

I reviewed our Schema Types and found I had only assigned an Article type to Posts. No Schema had been defined for pages.

To fix this, I added a WebPage schema type for pages & confirmed it was added to the page. The schema now also had a dateModified attribute.

I went into Google Search Console and had it reindex the page.

Within an hour or so the page was ranking in position 3!

It’s amazing we were able to recover rankings so quickly, with only a simple tweak to the schema. But it’s disappointing that this happened at all.

I understand it’s ultimately my fault for not configuring the plugin correctly, taking so long to catch this issue, etc.

That said, I think other people could avoid this problem if you added sensible schema by default to all pages and posts. Please consider doing this so others don’t experience what I did.

I appreciate the plugin and will continue to use it. It’s very powerful and produces better schema than anything else I could find. I only think you need better defaults and documentation. And perhaps an improved setup wizard. Maybe you should force users to choose a schema type of each post type? Or require them to deliberately choose to not add schema to a post type? Not adding schema by default is a recipe for disaster. At least it was in my experience.