Joost de Valk (@joostdevalk) – WordPress user profile

Joost de Valk

Partner at Emilia Capital

@joostdevalk Wijchen, The Netherlands joined Jul 2007

joost.blog github.com/jdevalk

Teams Core Meta

Languages nl_NL

Bio

I’m an internet entrepreneur, probably best known for founding Yoast.

Together with my wife Marieke I’m an investor in several companies through Emilia Capital, some of which deal with WordPress like Castos, WordProof and Extendify.

WordPress Origin Story

I started working with WordPress in 2006, while building css3.info and my personal site which was, back then, still joostdevalk.nl. As I was also working as an SEO consultant and wanted to improve the SEO of my sites, to scratch my own itch I started building SEO plugins. In doing this I found things in core needed fixing so I also started contributing to WordPress core in 2007. I later combined my several SEO plugins into “the” WordPress SEO plugin, later renamed to Yoast SEO.

Badges

CODE

4 badges

Core Contributor '15 Meta Contributor '16 Plugin Developer Theme Developer

CONTENT

2 badges

Marketing Contributor '19 Photo Contributor '24

COMMUNITY

2 badges

WordCamp Organizer '18 WordCamp Speaker '19

POLYGLOTS

2 badges

Translation Contributor '16 Translation Editor '17

Current Job

Partner

Present

Emilia Capital

Recent impact

Score weights high-impact work (commits, releases, approved translations, props) at 3x routine activity.

Last 30 days

0contributions

high0

medium0

score0

Last 90 days

0contributions

high0

medium0

score0

Last 12 months

3contributions

high3

medium0

score9

Specializations

evenly split across 2 teams · no team-attributable activity in the last 365 days

Core Meta

Contributions

Type

February 2026

Feb 02 Mon · 21:16

Meta high

Confirmed as a speaker for WordCamp Netherlands 2025

September 2025

Sep 22 Mon · 09:55

Meta high

Confirmed as a speaker for WordCamp Netherlands 2025

June 2025

Jun 13 Fri · 09:19

Meta high

Confirmed as a speaker for WordCamp Netherlands 2024

September 2024

Sep 14 Sat · 13:34

Forums med

Posted a reply to 500 Error after installing AAA Option Optimizer, on the site WordPress.org Forums:
hmm that’s showing a ton of warnings but none that are from my plugin. Can…

Sep 14 Sat · 12:22

Forums med

Posted a reply to 500 Error after installing AAA Option Optimizer, on the site WordPress.org Forums:
They’re the web server PHP error logs, you could maybe find them in your hosting…

Sep 14 Sat · 09:56

Forums med

Posted a reply to 500 Error after installing AAA Option Optimizer, on the site WordPress.org Forums:
hi, I’d love to figure that out. Are there any logs showing the specific error?

Sep 08 Sun · 19:29

Forums med

Posted a reply to Deleting the plugin?, on the site WordPress.org Forums:
They will remain deleted!

August 2024

Aug 20 Tue · 11:42

Forums med

Posted a reply to AutoLoad Significance, on the site WordPress.org Forums:
The latter, they will load later if needed. So an option that's only needed a…

Aug 19 Mon · 18:34

Meta med

Wrote a comment on the post Automatic conversion of HEIC images to JPEG in WordPress 6.7, on the site Make WordPress Core:
Tested it, it works nicely! However, it leads to enormous .jpg files on the server…

Aug 09 Fri · 14:40

Meta med

Wrote a comment on the post Proposed Change to Advertising/Marketing Expense Guidelines, on the site Make WordPress Community:
+100 and I don’t need money. Just need permission to install an SEO plugin on…