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SEO Recipe Baseline

When to Use

Start here when setting up SEO for any Drupal 11.3+ site. The two Drupal CMS SEO recipes give you a battle-tested module stack with sane defaults in minutes. Apply both for a complete SEO foundation, or selectively require individual modules if the full stack is too heavy.

Decision

Situation Choice Why
New Drupal 11.3+ site, want full SEO stack Apply both recipes Opinionated defaults for every SEO layer — paths, redirects, breadcrumbs, meta tags, sitemaps, content scoring
Existing site, avoid conflicts Apply seo_basic only Pathauto + Redirect + Easy Breadcrumb are safe to add to any site
Already have Metatag configured Skip seo_tools or apply selectively Recipes import config; may overwrite your existing Metatag defaults
Headless / decoupled Drupal Apply seo_basic only Metatag and Yoast output HTML — irrelevant for headless; Pathauto + Redirect still matter
Drupal < 11.3 Manual module install Recipes require Drupal 11.3+ core recipe support

Pattern

Require and apply both recipes:

composer require drupal/drupal_cms_seo_basic drupal/drupal_cms_seo_tools
drush recipe recipes/contrib/drupal_cms_seo_basic
drush recipe recipes/contrib/drupal_cms_seo_tools
drush cr

Apply only the basic recipe (paths + redirects + breadcrumbs):

composer require drupal/drupal_cms_seo_basic
drush recipe recipes/contrib/drupal_cms_seo_basic
drush cr

What each recipe installs:

Recipe Modules Config provided
drupal_cms_seo_basic Pathauto, Redirect, Easy Breadcrumb, Token Pathauto patterns for nodes/taxonomy/users; redirect on alias change enabled; breadcrumb settings
drupal_cms_seo_tools Metatag, Yoast SEO (Real-time SEO), Simple Sitemap, SEO Checklist, ECA, Field Group, Focal Point Global/content-type Metatag defaults with tokens; sitemap config including all entity types; Focal Point image crop settings

Out-of-the-box config from drupal_cms_seo_basic:

  • Pathauto node pattern: /[node:content-type]/[node:title]
  • Pathauto taxonomy pattern: /[term:vocabulary]/[term:name]
  • Redirect module with auto-redirect on alias change enabled
  • Easy Breadcrumb with home segment, title segment, and path-based segments

Out-of-the-box config from drupal_cms_seo_tools:

  • Metatag global defaults: title [node:title] | [site:name], description [node:summary]
  • Metatag front page defaults with site name and description
  • Simple Sitemap configured to include all node types, taxonomy terms, and the front page
  • Yoast SEO widget added to node edit forms for content scoring
  • SEO Checklist task list available at /admin/config/search/seo-checklist

Common Mistakes

  • Wrong: Running drush recipe without composer require first → Right: The recipe package must be downloaded before Drush can apply it
  • Wrong: Applying drupal_cms_seo_tools on a site with existing Metatag config → Right: Back up your Metatag config first; recipes import config that can overwrite defaults
  • Wrong: Expecting recipes to work on Drupal < 11.3 → Right: Upgrade to 11.3+ or install modules manually with custom config
  • Wrong: Re-running a recipe expecting it to update an already-applied config → Right: Recipes are applied once; subsequent config changes go through the normal config management workflow

See Also