Etch Was Going to Eliminate Yoast. It Just Added Yoast Compatibility.
Yoast, RankMath, ACF and Perfmatters, named under the categories Kevin Geary's pre-sale slide struck through in red. Here's how that's going.
Kevin Geary’s company, Digital Gravy, makes Etch. In this article, Etch means the WordPress builder plugin, also called EtchWP.
Geary’s pre-sale slide above says “Etch will eliminate the need for”, then lists eight categories, all struck through in red. It names the SEO plugins Yoast and RankMath. It names ACF, a custom field plugin, and Perfmatters, a performance plugin. It even names VS Code, the code editor.
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SEO. The slide promised title, description, slug, indexing, redirections and schema “from the UDE”, meaning the builder. The builder has no SEO panel and no SEO command, and I found no redirects screen. Etch’s pricing FAQ still says you can “manage SEO optimization, and a lot more directly from within Etch”. Yet on 8 October 2026, version 1.7.0 announced “Yoast SEO and Rank Math compatibility”. You don’t add compatibility with something you’ve eliminated.
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ACF. In April 2026, asked for the best stack, Geary himself said: “etch automatic CSS ACF”. That’s Etch, plus Automatic.css, his company’s CSS framework, plus the plugin his slide said you wouldn’t need.
Etch’s own docs call its fields “more of a playground right now than a real part of your workflow (unless your needs are very basic)”. They’re right. Its field types are text, textarea, number, image, date, time, select, radio, checkbox and boolean. It has no relationship, repeater, gallery, file or link field. That’s not replacing ACF.
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Perfmatters. The slide promised “Perfmatters-style optimization”. Etch has image handling, but no caching or script management screen.
The slide said “will eliminate”. The pricing FAQ, from the same September, said “eventually”. Meanwhile the pricing page says “Replaces 6+ premium plugins”, present tense, no asterisk. I’ve taken that line apart here.
The rest of the list
- Content relationships. The pitch was “Etch will bring tremendous simplicity and innovation to relational content in WordPress.” Etch has no relationship field of its own.
- Bulk-creating pages. “Bulk-create pages/posts”, the slide said. Etch’s Content Hub screen has one “New Page” row. I found no bulk option. The docs point to Etch’s experimental AI Build Mode for that, which I didn’t test.
- Version control. The pitch was to “write everything possible to actual files that can be properly versioned in Git”. It was marked experimental then, and the pricing page calls it “not currently available” now. The builder has no screen or command for it. Etch’s Why Etch? page says “eventually git-able”. That word again.
- Native faceting. That means built-in filters. The facets pages in Etch’s docs say “Coming soon…”. The builder has no facet element or command.
- Mixins. I found no screen or command for them.
- The infinite canvas, “Sketches” and Auto REM. The plugin doesn’t mention any of them. The canvas was marked experimental too.
In the builder, the Content Hub, the Asset Manager and the Style Manager all still wear a “WIP” badge, meaning work in progress. That’s nine months after “the official release”.
My favourite slide is the one where “Auto REM Conversion” is described like this: “If you’ve got a bunch, add another row, or use multiple copies of this slide.”
That’s template filler. It’s in a deck asking for $1,299.