Migrating From Yoast To RankMath Broke My Site

28 Jul 2021 | ~3 minute read

Yoast vs RankMath is a hot topic of debate. Yoast is the king of WordPress SEO plugins and RankMath is the new kid on the block.

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. I've been a happy Yoast Premium user for a few years now, so if it's not broke, don't fix it. Right?

Well, yeah, Yoast has been good to me. It'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 doesn'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.

I'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.

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 I'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 waited...and 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, I'm happy to say.

Closing thoughts

When it comes to Yoast vs RankMath, there'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. It's a real shame though, because on paper RankMath is the superior tool to Yoast, in my opinion.

Maybe one day I'll give it another try, or if there'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, I'd love to hear about what you're using - feel free to use the reply button below.

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