If you previously had another SEO plugin installed on your website – when you install Rank Math, you’ll see the notification “Please keep only one SEO plugin active; otherwise, you might lose your rankings and traffic” in your WordPress admin area:
The idea of having more than one SEO plugin for 2x optimization of your website for search engines is a misconception, and we shouldn’t have 2 plugins to perform the same task as it can hurt your website more than it does any good.
Reasons to Keep Only One SEO Plugin Active
In this knowledgebase article, we’ll discuss the various reasons why you should keep only one SEO plugin active on your website.
1 To Avoid Plugin Conflicts
When you’ve multiple SEO plugins installed on your website to perform the same SEO task, they will likely be targetting the same hooks/action to get the task done.
This, in turn, can end up with several conflicts between your plugins, and the worst, you may end up breaking your website. Moreover, if not taken care of immediately, you might even lose your traffic and organic rankings. Hence, it would be best if you could avoid such a scenario.
2 Reduce Impact on the Speed
Every time when you visit a webpage,
- Your browser makes a request to the server
- The server process the request received
- And finally, the server returns a response to your browser
SEO plugins allow you to add metadata, Schema Markup, Open Graph to your website’s HTML code. And if you set up multiple SEO plugins to do the same task, then each SEO plugin needs to execute its own set of code, to add these tags and structured data before the server returns a response to the browser. Thus, it can potentially affect the TTFB of your website.
3 Usability of the WordPress Editor
Every SEO plugin has its own Meta Box to give its users a better user experience while managing the post’s metadata in an easy-to-use UI instead of working with code.
But when you’ve multiple SEO plugins active, you can imagine all their Meta boxes cramped inside your WordPress editor with similar settings, making the editor less and less usable.
4 To Avoid Conflicts With Metatags
You can implement structured data on your website using JSON-LD, microdata, or RDFa. While JSON-LD is the preferred format by Google, the other formats (or syntaxes) are also widely used.
If you’re using multiple SEO plugins on your website for adding structured data, you may come across an instance where one of your SEO plugins uses JSON-LD for adding Schema Markup, and another plugin uses Dublin core metadata.
The intent of adding structured data is to help search engines better understand the content of your website. But, unfortunately, Google cannot merge the properties from two different syntaxes that you’ve used, and in many cases, it may not fulfill the requirements of Google’s rich snippet, and you may end up losing the opportunity for increased visibility in search results.
Final Words
Now that we’re clear of the consequences of having multiple plugins installed, we recommend keeping only one SEO plugin installed on your website. And Rank Math is packed with all the awesome SEO features you’ll require, eliminating the need for additional SEO plugins on your website. If you haven’t already started using Rank Math, you can install Rank Math plugin from here.
And that’s it! If you’ve absolutely any questions about getting Rank Math installed on your website, feel free to reach our support team directly from here, and we’re always here to help.