Rank Math Review – Why I Ditched Yoast For RankMath

  • Matthew Woodward
  • Updated on Mar 1, 2024
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Are you wearing black?

Because today we’re holding a funeral.

It’s for a dear old friend of ours…

The Yoast SEO plugin.

It has been a relatively faithful friend and served us well for many many years.

It was there for the high rankings…

…and for the low ones.

But the time has come to say goodbye. Because there’s a new free SEO plugin in town…

Rank Math.

Rank Math Review: Why I Ditched Yoast For Good

Rank Math creates the perfect foundation for increasing your search traffic.

In comparison to Yoast, it’s:

  • Faster
  • Easier
  • More intuitive

And it achieves all of this without slowing your website down. Just take a look at this side-by-side comparison:

Yoast SEO vs Rank Math review SEO

Better still, it has more modern-day SEO features.

For example…

They have a 100-point page analysis test that goes deep into the needs of each page:

100 Point Page Analysis Test

They allow you to optimize for up to 5x target keywords per page for free which you would have to pay for with Yoast-

5 Target Keywords

And, they have a 1x-click advanced SEO analysis tool, to help you perform a site-wide audit in a jiffy:

Site Wide Audit Tool

And best of all?

 It’s absolutely free.

Take a look at this quick video to learn more about Rank Math:

YouTube video

 
So I’m going to show you how to setup Rank Math the right way and migrate from Yoast if you need to.

How To Migrate To Rank Math

You can painlessly migrate to Rank Math in just a few clicks.

They have a comprehensive setup wizard that allows you to:

  • Migrate from Yoast & other SEO plugins
  • Quickly add essential site information
  • Optimize all your previous posts

Meaning you could be up and running in the next 10 to 20 minutes.

Step #1: Backup Your Site And Perform A Quick Audit

The first step is to back up the current version of your site which you can do this using a free plugin like Updraft.

Once you have your backup, use a site audit tool like:

To perform a quick crawl of your site to get a snapshot of your current SEO situation.

This is so we can compare our site before and after the migration to make sure everything went as expected and we didn’t create any holes.

I noted down some random stats from my crawl in a Google sheet:

Yoast to Rank Math Migration 34x Key Stats

You can get your own version of the sheet by clicking here.

Keep this information handy because we’ll be using it as a benchmark to make sure your Rank Math deployment was successful (better safe than sorry right!).

Now let’s start setting up Rank Math…

(Optional) Step #2: Migrate From Yoast (or other SEO plugins)

If your site is currently using Yoast SEO or any of the other popular SEO plugins, you can quickly migrate everything to Rank Math.

This allows you to easily make the switch without:

  • Needing to update your old posts
  • Going through all your settings again

Rank Math will automatically detect which SEO plugin your site is running and offer to migrate you.

Just go to-

Sidebar > Rank Math > Setup Wizard

And you should see this prompt:

Rank Math Import Seo Settings

Make sure the 4x import boxes are ticked. Then click “Start Import from Yoast SEO”

You can now start configuring your site…

Step #3: Configure Rank Math

If you didn’t import from Yoast…

Go to your WordPress dashboard.

Open:

Sidebar > Rank Math > Setup Wizard

You will see this page:

Rank Math Start Wizard

Click ‘Start Wizard’.

If you did import from Yoast…

You will already see the screen about website information. Either way, fill out the basic information for your site:

Website Information

Click ‘Save and Continue’.

Now, connect your Google Search Console account:

Google Search Console

*Save and continue.*

Now it’s time to create your sitemaps. You’ll want to turn ON:

  • Sitemaps
  • Images
  • Posts
  • Pages

And turn OFF anything else that isn’t required.

Sitemap Configuration

*Save and continue.*

On the SEO Tweaks page, leave everything as default. That should look like this:

SEO Tweaks

*Save and continue.*

That completes the initial setup. On the final page click the ‘return to dashboard’ option.

Then go to:

Rank Math > General Settings > Images

If you are generally on top of your alt tags (which you should be) you can leave these two options set to off.

But if you want Rank Math to automatically generate them for you (not recommended), you can enable it here-

Images Settings

*Save your changes.*

Then go to:

Rank Math > Titles & Meta > Global Meta

On this page turn ‘Capitalize titles’ ON.

*Save your changes.*

Then head to:

Rank Math > Titles & Meta > Global Meta > Homepage

And fill out your homepage information:

Homepage Information

*Save your changes.*

Finally, go to:

Rank Math > Titles & Meta > Global Meta > Social Meta

And fill out all of your social profiles:

Social Meta

*Save your changes.*

And…that’s it!

 Once you have completed this list you have set up the world’s best free SEO plugin.

Step #4: Review The Changes

The final step is to see how migrating to Rank Math has affected your site.

Use the tool you used earlier to re-crawl your site and then compare the results-

Process Review

Most of these changes for me were minimal and upon further investigation, they were nothing to worry about.

BUT…

Pay close attention If you see changes like this:

Removed Canonicalization Tags

In this case, Rank Math made a HUGE change to my site.

It removed canonicalization tags from my tag archive pages because they were no-indexed but that’s OK because the pages aren’t indexed anyway.

If you see any radical changes your not sure of, let me know in the comments and I’ll help you out.

Rank Math VS Yoast SEO

Overall, Rank Math is a competitor that must be taken seriously by Yoast SEO – the best SEO plugin for WordPress.

Yoast SEO plugin offers a free plan with some good features but they are limited, if you want to go in-depth, you need to buy the premium version.

While Rank Math offers the exact same features for free and more. Indeed, Rank Math gives you access to features that are not even included on the Yoast premium version.

Overall, there are 3 reasons why Rank Math is considered more affordable than Yoast:

  1. Rank Math top-level plans are lower than Yoast.
  2. Yoast doesn’t offer an unlimited licence but Rank Math does with its premium plan that supports unlimited websites.
  3. Rank Math proposes a single premium plan with all the features while Yoast has multiple. So if you want to get access to the same features, you will need to do different purchases and will end up paying more.

Wrapping It Up

Here are the headlines of my Rank Math review:

  • Rank Math is free to use
  • Rank Math is better than Yoast Premium ($89+ per year)

It can also INSTANTLY help you to fix many website issues.

For example…

My rich snippets were filled with errors and “bloat” from a third-party plugin I was using:

Rich Snippets Errors

As you can see it produced a number of warnings and errors!

But after installing Rank Math and using their rich snippet feature these problems were solved instantly-

Rich Snippets Fixed

There was also a remarkable drop off in the errors on my site after installing:

Less Site Errors

So, the real question is…

Why pay $89 a year for Yoast when you can get the more powerful Rank Math for free?

Oh, and did I mention that they have excellent customer support?

rank math support

What are you waiting for?

Download Rank Math now – it’s 100% free.

Rank Math is a great SEO plugin because it helps to optimize your website for better rankings in a couple of clicks. It is also easy to use, even if you are unfamiliar with SEO. They also have a great support team that is very responsive and they add new features constantly.

Frequently Asked Questions

Rank Math is a Search Engine Optimization plugin for WordPress that I was so impressed by, I migrated all of my sites to use it. They offer a lot of incredible features under one roof and best of all – it’s 100% free.
Rank Math is totally worth it. It's probably the best alternative to Yoast at the time of writing. It's a handy plugin that can help you with your SEO tasks such as on page optimization, content analysis, redirects, rich snippets, etc. All of that, for free!
Yes, it is! At the time of writing Rank Math is 100% free for anyone to use. Not surprising that it's becoming a 'must have' SEO tool.
The biggest difference is pricing, RankMath is completely free. Yoast on the other hand has a freemium model which means you have to pay to access all of the plugins features. Rank Math allows you to enjoy all of those premium features for free, but that might change in the future if they release a premium version.
Yes – there is a dedicated setup wizard that will take you through the migration process. Rank Math will import all of your settings in one click but please see my full tutorial above for the correct testing procedure.
No, you can’t use Rank Math and Yoast on the same website. You need to migrate from one plugin to another. If you don’t know how to do that, just follow my step by step process.
Yes, it is! Rank Math’s main objective is to help people improve their SEO results by giving them actionable recommendations to work on.
Yes, Rank Math is a safe WordPress plugin! They had some vulnerability issues in the past (earlier versions) but have found a way to fix them in their latest version.

Rank Math Review

  • Review Of: Rank Math
  • Reviewed By: Matthew Woodward
  • Rating:
  • Updated On: Mar 1, 2024
Summary:

Rank Math is the new best free SEO WordPress plugin for anyone that is building out their website. I have been running it across my fleet of sites for the last 9 months and have now converted all of my sites from Yoast SEO to RankMath.

View More Details

What Are Your Thoughts?

312 Responses

  1. Using the pro version – used to be a great tool but now the ContentAI feature doesn’t work for a while – opened a ticked and 3 weeks later still no answer – just some AI generated response.

    Updated and waited for a fix – ended up canceling my subscription. I will look for a different tool. So sad since it used to work just fine now it doesn’t and it is full of bugs – very annoying. And all the support we get is AI-generated.

  2. I installed Rank Math, paid their premium version and it broke my website (luckly I had a backup). Their support is stubborn and they refuse to take responsibility when something doesn’t work. Horrible experience.

  3. I’ve used Rank Math Pro for about 18 months on about 20 websites. Setup is nice, features are nice, and I always elect to receive monthly email reports on each website I install it on. To date I’ve received about 3 emails total from those 20 websites.

    The dashboard analytics frequently (usually) display no visitor data which does not reflect actual Google Analytics data. Rank Math Pro know this is a real problem and has still not solved it.

  4. Rank math isn’t completely free. You still have to buy credits to do a search or it gives you a negative reading.

  5. i already made this change (yoast to Rankmath) a year ago and i cant be more happy. Yoast is no good after version 17.2. Rankmath is so superior, that i cant even compare these two.

  6. I have been running rank math for over 2 years now on over a dozen sites, and I am paying for the Business edition.During those 2+ years, I have had endless problems with Rakmath constantly reporting incorrect rankings and the analytics just being plain wrong or not working at all and reporting ZERO for everything because it keeps losing the connection to Google and constantly needs to be reconnected or because rank math just breakds and all the data needs to be reindexed and the database repaired.The rankings usually won’t even match what the Google search console says, even though support say this is where they get the data from.I also use other tools to monitor the rankings, and these also report very differently to rank math,Sites will have multiple top-ranking keywords, but Rankmath will say they have none.Obviousy its not good when your clients are getting the monthly report which incorrectly says their rankings and traffic suck, when they don’tI have exchanged dozens and dozens of tickets with Rankmath support over the last 2+ years and have got nowhere, just going round and round in circles.If you use rankmath to monitor or track your analytics/keywords/ranking, then I highly suggest you verify that data elsewhere to see if it is actually correct.

    1. Thank you for sharing this issue with us.Which tool(s) do you use to monitor and track all your rankings now?

  7. Yes, the Yoast SEO plugin is considered the most popular SEO plugin which is used by over 5 million happy users. But, personally, I find Rank Math to be the best free SEO Plugin because of the features they provide compared to Yoast. As a blogger, I wish I could produce such a great article like this. I love reading articles from matthewwoodward. It has lots of insights that could benefit the readers.

  8. Yes, I switched To the rank math. It’s really much better than Yoast’s green lights. Thanks, Matthew for Endorsing the Rank Math

    1. Green lights red lights, this things are useless, don’t hang on that. Because Google replace your description with theirs. Focus keywords are nonsense ignore it.

  9. Nah, I don’t buy this. I’ve installed Rank Math before, after buying their aggressive marketing but I removed it after less than one day. It might not be as heavy as Yoast but it is still heavy. There are better lightweight alternatives with less bugs. That said, if you are using schema plugins that add ratings to normal webpages and a “summary” you’d be inclined to buy the hype.

  10. Have used both but prefer Yoast. They both offer advantages over one another so just comes down personal preference.

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