Verified purchaser
Poor support, breaks my blog
Several weeks ago I wrote to SEO Booster, but got no answer.
It breaks my blog letters.
I’m experiencing a reproducible encoding issue caused by SEO Booster and wanted to report it.
When the plugin is active, German special characters are corrupted in post content.
Example:
• Correct input: „gießen“
• After saving / rendering with SEO Booster active: „gieÃen“
This happens even when the text is typed manually (no copy/paste).
What I’ve verified
• HTML meta charset is set correctly: <meta charset="UTF-8">
• HTTP response header is correct: text/html; charset=UTF-8
• Issue occurs across browsers (Safari, Chrome)
• Caching plugins disabled
• JavaScript disabled → issue still present
• As soon as SEO Booster is deactivated, the content displays correctly and remains stable
This strongly suggests a UTF-8 double-encoding or incorrect charset handling during content analysis or rewrite by the plugin.
Expected behavior
UTF-8 characters (ß, ä, ö, ü) should remain unchanged when the plugin processes content.
So no recommendation for the plugin.
It was updated 12 months before, says the WordPress plugin.
So it's no use without an update, and the money is gone. :(
Lars_Koudal
Jan 22, 2026Thank you for your detailed report, and we sincerely apologize for the poor experience.
We understand your frustration - both with the encoding issue and the lack of support response. That's not the standard we want to uphold, and we take full responsibility. We're also sorry about the email deliverability issues you experienced. We've identified that our email hosting has been unstable and are actively moving to a more reliable provider.
Regarding the UTF-8 encoding issue: This is a serious bug that we should have addressed immediately. We've just released a complete rewrite of SEO Booster (available today) that includes significant improvements to how the plugin handles content processing. The new version includes database table updates that should resolve encoding-related issues. We'd genuinely appreciate it if you'd be willing to test the latest version and let us know if the German character corruption persists—your feedback would be invaluable in ensuring we've fixed this properly.
What's new in today's release:
- Comprehensive page analysis (20+ SEO checks per URL) integrated with Google Search Console
- Bulk page analysis with an "SEO Possibilities" dashboard for quick wins
- Bulk image optimization tool (AI-powered title, alt text, caption, and description generation via OpenAI) - you need your own API key.
- Improved automatic linking feature—more stable and faster than before
We haven't been transparent about our development progress, and that's on us. Going forward, we're committed to keeping our community updated and responding to support requests promptly.
If you're open to giving the new version a try, we'd love to hear if it resolves your issues. If you have any questions or concerns, please reach out directly - we'll make sure you get a response this time.
Again, we're sorry for letting you down.