A new EmDash plugin was released that provides website management, performance, and SEO capabilities that are missing in EmDash. Despite all the features it adds, the plugin pack makes websites “absurdly fast.” The plugin is modular, enabling users to take advantage of only the functionalities they need.
Who Created The Coywolf Pack Matters
There are many people who are using AI to generate all manner of plugins and software but the developer of the Coywolf pack, Jon Henshaw, is an acknowledged SEO expert with over 30 years of experience.
Henshaw is currently the Director of Audience Management at Yahoo, and has previously worked as the Head of SEO at CNET, Vimeo, plus managed global SEO for Paramount+, Pluto TV, and Showtime. Henshaw also developed the Raven Tools SEO platform that was acquired in 2017.
There is hardly anyone in the SEO industry who is as respected as Henshaw and has the level of trustworthiness and experience that he brings to his Coywolf Pack for EmDash. As you will see, the Coywolf Pack supercharges EmDash-based websites with more functionalities and exceedingly high performance.
Three Categories Of Improvements
The plugin adds three categories of improvements and expanded capabilities
- Publishing and Management Capabilities
- SEO
- Website Performance
About Publishing and Management Capabilities
There are many significant additions to this category of improvements. However, many devs and site owners will likely appreciate the website backup and recovery feature, secure storage for files submitted through website forms, file downloads with usage tracking, and expanded content blocks.
Coywolf Pack also extends EmDash’s existing video capabilities with Cloudflare Stream hosting and management, video engagement tracking, and captions. It also adds automatic VideoObject structured data for videos managed through its Cloudflare Stream integration and a video XML sitemap.
There are also content blocks that call attention to important information, along with blocks for disclosures, quotes, testimonials, and podcast links.
What bears noting is that these features do not add bloat. I tested the home page and inner web pages, including the category page for videos and a page with a video on it, and they all achieved perfect PageSpeed Insights scores of 100.
SEO
Coywolf Pack improves EmDash’s SEO capabilities with expanded crawler controls and structured data, stronger focus on aiding search engine content discovery, metadata generation, link and redirect management, and other features that add to or vastly improve EmDash’s built-in SEO features.
Coywolf Pack’s Discovery module adds:
- Google News sitemap
Helps Google discover recently published news articles. - IndexNow
Notifies participating search engines when content is published, updated, or removed. - LLMs.txt
Provides a list of website content intended for AI systems. - Markdown versions
Makes articles available in a format that’s easier for AI systems to process.
WordPress Migration
The Coywolf Pack WordPress migration module is an example of how it improves over the native function in EmDash. EmDash already has a WordPress Migration feature but it falls short of providing a perfect migration for real-world data imports.
Coywolf Pack’s WordPress Import module extends EmDash’s built-in importer to preserve content, URLs, redirects, and site relationships that might otherwise be lost during a WordPress to EmDash migration.
Here is how Coywolf Pack extends EmDash’s native WordPress importer:
Heading IDs
Preserves existing heading anchor links so that links to specific sections of articles continue working (and showing up in Google search results).
Preserves Existing Redirects
Converts old WordPress slugs and redirect rules from Yoast, Rank Math, and Redirection into EmDash redirects. EmDash’s native importer imports Yoast and Rank Math SEO titles and descriptions but there is no documentation about importing redirects from those three popular SEO and redirect plugins.
Comprehensive Media URL Importer
Redirects legacy WordPress media URLs to the imported media library, including resized image variants and files outside WordPress’s media library. This goes beyond EmDash’s native media library importer, which is perfectly fine, but is missing this extra step which many publishers may need.
WordPress Import (Maintains Parent-Child Hierarchy)
A successful site migration can often hinge on replicating an accurate one-to-one URL and site hierarchy relationships. Failure to perfectly replicate the old site can lead to delays and loss of ranking.
EmDash’s native WordPress importer creates imported categories at the top level but can lose their original parent-child relationships. So if you have this kind of hierarchical structure: News > Local> Article, the Coywolf Pack importer will preserve that parent-child relationship. The same issue affects WordPress pages that have parent pages. Coywolf Pack restores parent-child relationships between categories and pages.
The parent-child hierarchy feature works like this:
- Identifies the original hierarchy.
- Checks and compares the imported categories with original WordPress hierarchies.
- Restores category parents using EmDash’s native taxonomy API to restore any missing parent-child relationships.
- Restores page URL hierarchy sot hat nested pages retain their original URL paths.
Co-Authors And Guest Authors
This is an example of how Coywolf can handle niche but real-world WordPress import issues. EmDash imports authors and guest authors. Coywolf can handle multiple authors for an article, guest author profiles that don’t require user accounts.
Importantly, Coywolf Pack supports importing data from these popular WordPress plugins:
- Co-Authors Plus
Restores additional author credits and guest-author profiles. - PublishPress Authors
Restores author assignments and associated profiles. - Coywolf Guest Author
Restores guest-author information from the plugin’s custom metadata.
WordPress Blocks Migration
Coywolf also supports migrating specific kinds of blocks that preserve their functionalities. It preserves reusable blocks, quotations, and expandable Details blocks. It also converts existing blocks from Coywolf’s WordPress plugins into corresponding Coywolf Pack blocks.
Eight Performance Enhancements
Coywolf Pack adds performance enhancements that extend EmDash’s existing capabilities, improving page speed, caching reliability, database efficiency, image delivery, and search responsiveness. It also automates performance management and reduces server and browser processing, helping publishers deliver faster websites with less maintenance.
EmDash is already well known for delivering fast websites. Henshaw describes the improvements from his Coywolf pack as bumping up his website to “absurdly fast” performance. He’s not exaggerating. I tested his site and it scores a perfect 100 in PageSpeed Insights.
Screenshot Of Perfect PageSpeed Insight Scores
Among the improvements is cache warming, which is the process of proactively caching web pages or resources before a website visitor requests them, which dramatically improves page speeds for those visitors. Normally a caching system doesn’t create a cache until a visitor first requests a web page but cache warming doesn’t wait around for a first visit. Cache warming proactively caches pages so their rendered HTML is ready cached before visitors arrive.
Here are short description of performance improvements
1. First Visits (Faster Page Delivery)
Keeps pages cached for days while automatically clearing outdated content after deployments and relevant settings changes. Cached responses take 60–90 milliseconds instead of 1–2 seconds, according to Coywolf.
2. Clearing the Cache (Automated Cache Management)
Clears affected cached content without unnecessarily clearing the entire website’s cache, preserving performance when settings or redirects change.
3. Cold Pages After a Clear (Automatic Cache Warming)
Prepares cached pages after deployments, cache clearing, and content edits so visitors and crawlers are less likely to encounter slower, uncached pages.
4. Images (Image Delivery and Optimization)
Delivers images directly from Cloudflare’s media infrastructure, with responsive sizing, long-term caching, and image dimensions specified in the HTML to prevent layout shifts and improve the Core Web Vitals Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) scores.
5. Live Search (Faster Internal Search)
This is an ingenious feature that improves the user experience. It provides instant search suggestions using a browser-based title index, cached search results, and fewer database queries.
6. Redirects (Faster URL Redirection)
Processes redirects before EmDash renders pages. It caches the responses to reduce server processing.
7. Fewer D1 Round Trips (Database Optimization)
Combines database queries, caches settings, and reuses retrieved information to reduce delays when generating uncached pages. It reduces the number of separate interactions with the database, helping uncached pages load faster.
Each database interaction (D1 round trip) costs approximately 25–30 milliseconds and these optimizations reduce the Coywolf pack’s database overhead when generating uncached pages.
8. No Client JavaScript Where It Isn’t Needed (Server-Side Rendering)
Renders tables of contents, breadcrumbs, reviews, and structured data on the server, reducing the amount of rendering that has to be done on the browser side and increasing the speed at which pages load.
Takeaways
- Expands EmDash’s capabilities
Coywolf Pack adds publishing, website management, SEO, and performance features that extend or improve EmDash’s existing functionality. - Experienced SEO
Jon Henshaw brings more than 30 years of SEO experience and a background developing software and managing search visibility for major publishers. - Publishing and website management
New capabilities simplify website maintenance, protect submitted files, improve video management, and give publishers more control over how content is presented. - SEO enhancements
Expanded crawler controls, structured data, metadata generation, and content discovery tools help publishers manage search visibility and make content accessible to AI systems. - Better WordPress migrations
Coywolf Pack addresses limitations in EmDash’s native importer by preserving URLs, redirects, content relationships, author credits, and other elements important to established websites. - Absurdly fast website performance
Eight performance enhancements improve caching, page delivery, database efficiency, image handling, and search responsiveness while reducing processing overhead. - Demonstrated performance
The author’s testing found perfect PageSpeed Insights scores of 100 on the home page and several internal pages, including pages featuring videos. - Modular design
Publishers can enable only the capabilities they need rather than running every feature.
Read more and get the free Coywolf Pack here.
Featured Image by Shutterstock/thirasap phaknara
