Override default Yoast SEO settings in WordPress

Sometimes the default Yoast SEO settings aren’t quite the way you want. For example, I wanted to enable twitter cards using the “Summary with large image” card type by default on a multisite network. Below you’ll find a snippet that does that, and can also be adapted to change any default option while still letting users override them if desired.

add_filter('wpseo_defaults', function($defaults, $option_name) {
  if($option_name === 'wpseo_social') {
    $defaults['twitter'] = true;
    $defaults['twitter_card_type'] = 'summary_large_image';
  }
  return $defaults;
}, 10, 2);

Tip

Looking for the proper $option_name ? If you enable the WP_DEBUG constant in your wp-config.php, it’ll show up on the relevant tab in the Yoast SEO admin:

This snippet was tested with Yoast SEO 2.3.5, but is likely to work for both older and newer versions.