Joost de Valk

Joost de Valk is a Dutch developer and entrepreneur best known as the founder of Yoast and creator of Yoast SEO, one of the most installed plugins in WordPress history. He sold Yoast to Newfold Digital in 2021, later built Progress Planner, and since June 2026 has worked at Your.Online, the group that took Progress Planner over.

De Valk started blogging and consulting on web development and SEO in 2004 and ran the CSS3.info site from 2006. His consulting clients included eBay, Disney, Meta and The Guardian. The WordPress SEO plugin he released in October 2010 became Yoast SEO, and the company he founded the same year grew around it in Wijchen, in the east of the Netherlands.

Yoast SEO now reports more than 10 million active installs on WordPress.org, and de Valk says it runs on over 15 million sites in total. Yoast grew into a sizeable company, with his wife Marieke van de Rakt as CEO from 2019, when he stepped back to chief product officer. That year he also briefly served as WordPress's marketing and communications lead. In August 2021 the couple sold Yoast to Newfold Digital; he became Newfold's head of WordPress strategy, served six months as Yoast's interim CTO and left in April 2023.

After Yoast he and Marieke formalised their angel investing as Emilia Capital, and he joined the boards of Patchstack, Atarim and Post Status, where he is chair. In 2024 he launched Progress Planner, a WordPress plugin that helps site owners keep their sites maintained, and in 2025 he helped build FAIR, a federated package manager for WordPress. In June 2026 Progress Planner joined Your.Online, where he is now Group Head of AI & Growth, so this profile lists him as a former maker.

He remains one of the most influential voices in WordPress: a self-taught builder who turned a free plugin into one of the best-known exits in the WordPress product economy.