Are Advanced Custom Field Pages Good or Bad For SEO?

I often say that one of the best things about WordPress is how customizable it is. From the millions of themes to the tens of thousands of plugins available to the ability to dig right into the code and tweak it yourself, you can do pretty much anything you could possibly want with WordPress if you know how.

Some people take a look at WordPress and think, "that's nice and all, but what if I want more?"

These kinds of people have a few options. One is to design a site from the ground up using raw code and script frameworks, eschewing something like WordPress as a CMS entirely. Personally, I don't like this option; having the back-end features of a CMS is way too valuable.

Another option is to use a plugin that expands and extends WordPress. There are a few of these, but one of the most powerful is ACF: Advanced Custom Fields.

ACF is a powerful tool, but there are some questions commonly batted around about whether or not it's viable for SEO. So, let's talk about it!

What is Advanced Custom Fields?

To start, let's dig into what ACF is and what it does.

Advanced Custom Fields is a plugin developed by the WP Engine folks. It's essentially a very powerful tool for creating custom blocks and post information to add onto various pages throughout your WordPress site.

What's interesting is how this works in three different ways, depending on who you are.

First is the user side. When a user visits a page with ACF fields, they will see a page that has content and data on it, just like normal. In fact, there's no way to actually tell just by looking at a page whether or not that page is using ACF, because ACF is a way to input, format, and display data.

If there's any indication from a user's perspective that ACF is in place, it's the consistency of data across posts of a given type. For example, it can be used to create a template of information about a piece of content, which the content creator has to fill out when they create that content. That way, each new page or post of that format will have the same, well, format. In that sense, it's almost like a template.

The second perspective is the site owner or content creator. The person who creates a piece of content for you using your WordPress dashboard will see not only the normal WordPress post editor but also any custom fields created by ACF that apply to that kind of content. This might be anything from a set of buttons for formatting options, to a list of data fields that need to be filled out for the content, to just pre-styled text boxes. It's almost like the WP block editor but immensely more powerful.

Often, the way this works is by creating new "post" types. Instead of creating a new post, you create a new job listing, or a new pet profile, or a new image gallery, or a new listicle. These new post types operate as custom field templates to fill out properly as you create the content.

The biggest benefit to this is that ACF lets you hook up schema.org markup to these custom fields, guaranteeing that you're using the right schema in the right place on the right pieces of content. Since schema has a bajillion different kinds of properties and terms you can use, and a lot of them might seem like they overlap when you're casually looking, it's easy to get them wrong. So, setting up ACF pages to make sure you get them right is a great way to go about it.

The third perspective is the developer perspective. The person actually creating the ACF boxes has to do so using either the built-in list of content fields or developing their own using custom field options. Custom field generation is extremely robust; you can, quite literally, do pretty much anything you would want to do. It turns WordPress into something a lot less like a CMS and a lot more like a webdev platform, like what Dreamweaver was, or what Atom or Bootstrap Studio or a general page builder might be today.

Developers can also access the API and code new fields directly, which is also immensely powerful.

Information to populate custom fields can be input by the content creator, by users, or pulled from existing content like widgets, comments, or data elsewhere.

If all of this sounds like a pretty robust page builder that can kind of do anything, well, that's the point. That's basically what ACF allows you to do with WordPress.

How Much Does Advanced Custom Fields Cost?

Advanced Custom Fields has a free WordPress plugin and a paid version.

The free plugin, found here, gives you access to the ACF field builder and the ability to add fields anywhere you want throughout WordPress. That includes:

• In posts
• In pages
• In user profiles
• In taxonomy terms
• In media pages
• In comments
• In custom pages

These can range from single pieces of data to complex forms that need to be filled out to publish the page.

The professional version of ACF comes with a bunch of additional features as well.

• Repeater fields, which are sub-fields that can be repeated within a field for nested data and customized displays.
• Custom blocks added directly to WordPress using a PHP-based framework, so you can work with ACF data directly from the block editor instead of through custom post types – or both.
• A flexible content field, which is a field that can have you choose between a handful of different custom fields that can all serve the purpose. Creating a piece of content and want to inject something like an image, a testimonial, or an FAQ? You can have this all under one field.
• An options page that can set global variables for custom fields, allowing you to change site-wide settings with ease across ACF fields.
• A gallery field, which is sort of like the image gallery function in WordPress, but way better.
• A clone field, which allows you to reuse fields and field groups instead of making them exclusive.

I'm not gonna lie here; a ton of the advanced features of ACF are things developers and code monkeys like me care about, but casual site owners are going to be more confused by than anything. If you've ever had an idea and wished you could find some way to pull it off in WordPress, ACF can probably do it. If you just add a new post to your blog once a week and never chafe at the limits of WordPress, ACF is overkill.

ACF's pro plans are annual licenses that escalate in price just based on the number of site licenses they give you. It's $50 per year for one site, $150 per year for up to ten sites, and $250 per year for unlimited sites. A long time ago they offered lifetime licenses, but those are gone now.

What Can You Do with Advanced Custom Fields?

Basically anything.

ACF can set you up to make advanced use of data in a ton of different ways. Some examples of things you can do:

• Set up a recipe block where each instruction in the recipe's steps has a line item with the appropriate schema tagged to it. The same goes for ingredients and other data for the recipe.
• Set up a product page where each specification about the product, like color, dimensions, sizing, SKU, and price, are all boxes to be filled out easily and automatically schema tagged.
• Set up a content gate where certain pages fade out and require user action like an opt-in or a registration to unlock.

On the other hand, much more simply, you can:

• Create an author field that will display author information for a post.
• Create a "fact checked by" field with information about who checked over your content.
• Add images with more information and styling than WordPress normally allows with the insert image block.

It's interesting, because I've seen people use ACF for basically just setting up a very lightly customized blog post template, and I've seen other sites essentially use it as an elaborate page builder that creates a site that looks almost nothing like a WordPress site.

Ironically, it's the first group that is more likely to get into trouble with ACF and SEO.

How Do Advanced Custom Fields Pages Affect SEO?

ACF is extremely powerful, but there's a downside: it can easily conflict in ways that you might not intend, or even realize is happening.

The biggest culprit I've seen is compatibility with SEO tools like Yoast, SEO Framework, or AIOSEO.

Why is this? Well, WordPress SEO plugins are designed to work with WordPress at its core. They add SEO options to WordPress pages and posts, and they scan those pages and posts to do things like add keyword recommendations or rate content for readability.

But with ACF, when you add custom fields to posts and pages or use completely new types of pages, you end up with boxes or fields that plugins like Yoast or SEO Framework can't see. It operates outside of the standard WordPress loop. You end up with post-analysis metrics that aren't accurate because half of your content is in the ACF fields, where the SEO plugin can't see it.

Here's a pretty good rundown from a few years ago of how many hoops you had to jump through to get ACF to work with SEO Framework. That's the kind of issue you can run into.

While this isn't necessarily a problem for SEO, it can be. For example, if you have a plugin that manages image SEO attributes, but you use the ACF gallery, and your SEO plugin can't see those images, you have to find another way to add the SEO information to the images in the gallery. This is doable, but if you don't think about it, you might end up with a ton of images missing SEO data that could be helping you out.

Another issue I've seen – in fact, I had to troubleshoot it with a client of mine – is a conflict with author fields. ACF pages used the Schema Author field, while their SEO plugin only looked for the normal WordPress author field. It overrode the author information with the wrong information, even though everything looked right from the outside. It was almost a hidden issue, and only when I did a pretty deep audit was I able to find out what was going on and fix it.

What I want to stress here is that ACF is not bad for SEO. But, it's an extremely powerful tool, and with great power comes great responsibility. It's very, very easy to do something wrong in ACF and end up with issues like pages being indexed when they shouldn't, or not being indexed when they should, or broken schema, or other issues you might not even know are SEO problems.

ACF is as good as your developer. If you stick to their tried-and-tested fields and use them carefully, you'll probably be fine. If you hire a developer who knows what they're doing and cross-checks functions with SEO, you're golden. On the other hand, if you hire a slipshod fly-by-night dev who throws something together using ChatGPT pasted code, you're in for trouble.

How do you know if ACF is hurting your SEO? There's no way around it but to do a deep on-page audit. Fortunately, if you want, I'll do that for you. Just give me a call! I've been at this game for a while and can give you the rundown in short order. Additionally, if you have any other questions, I'd be happy to answer those as well! Feel free to leave those in the comments section down below, and I'll get back to you with answers as soon as I can! I'm always more than willing to help my readers out however possible.