Migrating From Yoast To RankMath Broke My Site

I've been a Yoast Premium user for a few years now, but decided to switch to RankMath recently. It didn't go well.

Why the change?

I suppose a good place to start with all this is why I wanted to change in the first place. Iโ€™ve been a happy Yoast Premium user for a few years now, so if itโ€™s not broke, donโ€™t fix it. Right?

Well, yeah, Yoast has been good to me. Itโ€™s allowed me to learn what I would consider to be the basics of SEO and as a result this site ranks fairly well on search engines.

However, there are some features RankMath has that Yoast doesnโ€™t. The big one being that RankMath allows you to track the SEO health of your site by tracking SEO rankings and click through rates.

Iโ€™m trying to get out of the analytics game, but I feel that information on how the site is performing on search engines would be very useful. Also, RankMath is pretty much half the price of Yoast.

So I thought there was no comparison when it came to Yoast vs RankMath. The latter has more features for half the price. No brainer, right?

Wrong!

I went ahead and bought RankMath Pro and installed it on my site. It migrated everything from Yoast just fine and I thought I was done. I went to bed a happy chappy.

The next morning I woke up to a number of people contacting me on Fosstodon informing me that my RSS feed was broken.

rankmath-rss-error

Fan-bloody-tastic. The only change I had made was replacing Yoast with RankMath, so I jumped on my staging site to do some testing and sure enough, RankMath was the problem.

I logged a ticket with their support team and got a response relatively quickly. However, the response was along the lines of:

Have you checked that your functions.php file is ok?

- RankMath support

My functions.php file was fine. I know this because Iโ€™d made no changes to it and could consistently reproduce and fix the RSS problem by enabling and disabling the RankMath plugin.

After this there was silence for over 24 hours.

I waited, and waitedโ€ฆand waited. In total I waited nearly 36 hours for a response (and chased the issue numerous times).

While having a broken RSS feed may not seem like the end of the world to many of you, I strongly support RSS and know that a lot of people consume my content via RSS.

After 36 hours of waiting with a broken RSS Feed, so the RankMath support team could troubleshoot the issue (which they never did), I decided to cut my losses and go back to Yoast.

RankMath offer a 30 day money back guarantee and they did honour this, Iโ€™m happy to say.

Closing thoughts

When it comes to Yoast vs RankMath, thereโ€™s a lot of people in both camps. Clearly the RSS issue is something unique to my site, I know that. But the poor support I received really put me off.

SEO is very important, I think. So not having such a critical plugin backed up by decent support is a problem for me. Itโ€™s a real shame though, because on paper RankMath is the superior tool to Yoast, in my opinion.

Maybe one day Iโ€™ll give it another try, or if thereโ€™s anyone else out there reading this who has had the same issue, please do let me know.

Do you use an SEO plugin on your site? If so, Iโ€™d love to hear about what youโ€™re using - feel free to use the reply button below.

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