Yoast has been the leading SEO plugin for WordPress in recent years, but the bugs caused by some updates have taken its toll.
Yoast SEO has been the market for a long time and it has already established a user base with over 5 million active installations. There is a strong foundation for the Yoast SEO plugin trusted by millions of creators around the world. This proves that Yoast SEO is undoubtedly the best plugin in the market, right? Well…
Rank Math was launched at the end of 2018 with a good reception and it seems that it is eating Yoast’s market little by little.
This brings us confusion that which one is the best SEO plugin for a WordPress website? Why should you use Yoast or Rank Math? In this article I am going to make a comparison between both plugins in their free versions.
Comparison between Yoast and Rank Math
The following table indicates the aspects that we value the most within an SEO plugin and show which plugin has them and which does not.
| Features | Rank Math | Yoast |
| Title and description variables | ✅ | ✅ |
| Noindex by content type | ✅ | ✅ |
| Noindex for individual content | ✅ | ✅ |
| Rich snippets | ✅ | ❌ |
| Rules for alt images | ✅ | ❌ |
| Automatic titles for alt images | ✅ | ❌ |
| Robots.txt and .htaccess editor | ✅ | ✅ |
| AMP | ✅ | ❌ |
| Import and export settngs | ✅ | ✅ |
Rank Math strengths
- It has many more variables for titles and descriptions.
- Allows further customization in sitemap.xml.
- It has a 404 error monitor.
- It incorporates a wizard to create redirects (although I prefer to do them via .htacess in case an update fails).
- It has a Role Manager to manage the permissions that users will have. Very useful if within a website there are several profiles of editors.
- It has an SEO Analysis tool that, although not advanced, gives us a general WooRank summary.
- It incorporates a Local SEO module that, in addition to adding business data, allows connecting with the Google Maps API.
Download Rank Math for WordPress
Yoast strengths
Basically the only strong point that I see is that the SEO community is more used to using this plugin.
Nevertheless, having fewer customization options can be easier to manage for small projects or that require less effort.
Download Yoast for WordPress
Which one do we prefer? Final conclusion
We prefer to use Rank Math in the new websites that we install with WordPress for two reasons:
- Yoast does not generate so much confidence in us due to the failures it has had in recent updates.
- Rank Math has more functionalities than Yoast that, although we don’t use them in all projects, it saves us from installing other plugins.
For those who use Yoast on your website and want to switch to Rank Math, you do not have to worry about the configuration. When installing Rank Math, a wizard will appear that allows you to load the configuration as you had it in Yoast. This part is important especially for titles and descriptions, since otherwise we would have to do it all again.