A new plugin for EmDash-based websites delivered perfect PageSpeed Insights scores of 100 on the home page and multiple internal pages, including video-heavy category pages, in testing by Search Engine Journal contributor Bill Hartzer. The plugin, Coywolf Pack, is free and modular, so publishers can switch on only the features they need.

The developer behind it matters. Jon Henshaw, currently Director of Audience Management at Yahoo, built the plugin. He previously headed SEO at CNET and Vimeo, managed global SEO for Paramount+, Pluto TV and Showtime, and created the Raven Tools SEO platform, which was acquired in 2017. He brings more than 30 years of SEO experience to the project.

What does Coywolf Pack add to EmDash?

The plugin extends EmDash in three broad categories: publishing and website management, SEO, and performance. Management features include:

• Website backup and recovery
• Secure storage for files submitted through forms
• File downloads with usage tracking
• Expanded content blocks for disclosures, quotes, testimonials and podcast links

Video handling gets a significant boost. Coywolf Pack integrates Cloudflare Stream hosting and management, adds video engagement tracking, captions, automatic VideoObject structured data (markup that helps search engines display video results) and a video XML sitemap.

Which SEO and AI-discovery features are included?

The Discovery module targets search engine crawling and AI-system content access. It adds a Google News sitemap for freshly published articles, IndexNow (a protocol that pings participating search engines when content is published, updated or removed), an LLMs.txt file listing site content for AI systems, and Markdown versions of articles that AI systems can process more easily.

Beyond discovery, the pack adds expanded crawler controls, structured data options, metadata generation and link and redirect management.

How does it fix WordPress-to-EmDash migration?

EmDash already ships a native WordPress importer, but it falls short on real-world data, according to the testing. Coywolf Pack's import module fills those gaps:

• Heading IDs: preserves existing anchor links so section links keep working in Google search results
• Redirects: converts slugs and redirect rules from Yoast, Rank Math and Redirection into EmDash redirects — EmDash's native importer imports Yoast and Rank Math titles and descriptions but has no documented path for redirects from those plugins
• Media URLs: redirects legacy WordPress media URLs, including resized image variants and files outside the media library
• Parent-child hierarchy: restores category and page hierarchies that EmDash's native importer flattens to the top level — critical because losing URL and hierarchy relationships can delay rankings
• Co-authors and guest authors: imports data from Co-Authors Plus, PublishPress Authors and Coywolf Guest Author
• Blocks: preserves reusable blocks, quotations and expandable Details blocks

How fast is "absurdly fast"?

Henshaw describes the performance gains as bumping his site to "absurdly fast" performance. Independent testing confirmed it: perfect 100 scores in PageSpeed Insights. The pack ships eight performance enhancements:

1. Cached page delivery: cached responses arrive in 60–90 milliseconds instead of 1–2 seconds, according to Coywolf, with caches held for days and cleared automatically after deployments
2. Selective cache clearing: clears only affected content instead of the full site cache
3. Cache warming: proactively builds cached pages before visitors or crawlers request them, so first visits hit warm caches
4. Image delivery: serves images from Cloudflare's media infrastructure with responsive sizing and dimensions specified in HTML, protecting Core Web Vitals Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) scores
5. Live search: instant suggestions via a browser-based title index, cached results and fewer database queries
6. Faster redirects: processes redirects before page rendering and caches the responses
7. Database optimization: combines queries and caches settings — each D1 round trip (a database interaction) costs roughly 25–30 milliseconds, and cutting those trips speeds up uncached pages
8. Server-side rendering: renders tables of contents, breadcrumbs, reviews and structured data on the server, reducing browser-side JavaScript work

What's the takeaway for publishers?

The testing found the feature set adds no measurable bloat: every page checked, including video pages, scored 100. For publishers weighing a WordPress-to-EmDash move, the migration module addresses the highest-risk failure points — redirects, hierarchies and author data — that typically cause ranking loss during platform changes. Publishers running EmDash can download the free Coywolf Pack and monitor whether future EmDash core updates absorb any of these functions natively.