By Priya Raman

A new plugin for EmDash, built by veteran SEO practitioner Jon Henshaw, delivers perfect PageSpeed Insights scores of 100 on tested pages while adding publishing, SEO and migration features the platform lacks. The plugin, called Coywolf Pack, is modular: publishers enable only the functions they need.

Henshaw currently serves as Director of Audience Management at Yahoo. He previously headed SEO at CNET and Vimeo, and managed global SEO for Paramount+, Pluto TV and Showtime. He also built the Raven Tools SEO platform, which was acquired in 2017. That track record matters for practitioners evaluating third-party plugins in a market crowded with AI-generated code.

Henshaw describes the performance result on his own site as "absurdly fast." Testing by Search Engine Journal's Roger Monti confirms the claim: the home page and internal pages, including a video category page and a page containing a video, all scored 100 in PageSpeed Insights.

What does the plugin actually change?

Coywolf Pack adds improvements in three categories: publishing and management, SEO, and website performance.

On the publishing side, the plugin adds:

• 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
• Cloudflare Stream video hosting, engagement tracking, captions, automatic VideoObject structured data and a video XML sitemap

The SEO additions include expanded crawler controls, structured data, metadata generation and link and redirect management. Its Discovery module offers a Google News sitemap, IndexNow notifications, an LLMs.txt file for AI systems and Markdown versions of articles so AI systems can process content more easily.

Why the WordPress migration module stands out

EmDash ships with a native WordPress importer, but it falls short on real-world data imports, according to the review. Coywolf Pack extends it in several concrete ways.

It preserves heading anchor IDs so links to article sections keep working and continue appearing in Google search results. It converts old WordPress slugs and redirect rules from Yoast, Rank Math and Redirection into EmDash redirects — something EmDash's native importer does not document. It redirects legacy WordPress media URLs, including resized image variants and files outside the media library.

The module also restores parent-child hierarchy. EmDash's native importer places imported categories at the top level and can lose original relationships, so a structure such as News > Local > Article would flatten out. Coywolf Pack identifies the original hierarchy, compares imported categories against it, and restores category parents through EmDash's native taxonomy API. Nested pages retain their original URL paths. Failure to replicate the old site accurately, the review notes, can delay migrations and cost rankings.

Co-authoring is handled too. The plugin supports multiple authors per article and guest author profiles that do not require user accounts, importing data from Co-Authors Plus, PublishPress Authors and Coywolf Guest Author. It also migrates reusable blocks, quotations and expandable Details blocks with functionality intact.

How fast is 'absurdly fast'?

Eight performance enhancements target caching, database efficiency, image delivery and server-side rendering. The numbers behind them:

• First visits: cached responses take 60–90 milliseconds instead of 1–2 seconds, according to Coywolf.
• Cache management: clears only affected cached content after settings or redirect changes, not the entire cache.
• Cache warming: pre-caches pages after deployments and content edits so visitors and crawlers rarely hit uncached pages.
• Images: served from Cloudflare's media infrastructure with responsive sizing and dimensions in HTML to protect Core Web Vitals CLS scores.
• Live search: instant suggestions from a browser-based title index with fewer database queries.
• Redirects: processed before EmDash renders pages, with cached responses.
• Database optimization: combined queries and cached settings cut D1 round trips, each of which costs roughly 25–30 milliseconds.
• Server-side rendering: tables of contents, breadcrumbs, reviews and structured data render on the server, reducing browser work.

What this means for publishers

For teams already on EmDash, the practical question is whether migration risk and performance overhead justify staying put. Coywolf Pack answers both: it closes the gaps in the native WordPress importer that historically made moves from WordPress lossy, and it pushes page delivery well below 100 milliseconds on cached requests. The plugin is free to download, so the cost of evaluating it is time, not licensing. Publishers weighing an EmDash move now have a migration path that preserves the URLs, redirects, hierarchies and author credits their rankings depend on.