@tabytharourke We’re sorry to hear you are experiencing this issue on your site.
No, there is not a way to disable this feature as the indexables feature became an integral part of the plugin as of the 14.0 release.
As for the performance issue you are seeing, does this occur once the data optimization is complete or during the optimization process itself?
Also, for sites with more than 10,000 posts, instead of using the ‘Start SEO data optimization’ button, we’d advise using the WP-CLI command wp yoast index --reindex to do the indexation on the server. You can read more about this here: https://yoa.st/wp-cli-index
We don’t have quite 10,000 posts, but it’s close, and it does seem like the problem might be that optimization isn’t being completed. We’ve also had issues with the images that og:image tags not updating because of the data that’s indexed, and we’ve had to manually clear those as well – is that something that would be fixed if we completed the index via wp-cli?
While we cannot guarantee whether performing the SEO data optimization will fix the slowness issue on the dashboard side for you, we do know the SEO data optimization helps larger sites to improve the performance.
In this case, we highly recommend you please complete the SEO data optimization first to see whether this improves anything for you.
We are going ahead and marking this issue as resolved due to inactivity. If you require any further assistance please create a new issue.
