Skip to content
WP Visibility

Switching

Migrate from Rank Math

Preview, then import titles, descriptions, canonicals, social text, indexing choices and term SEO from Rank Math. Redirections come over from a Rank Math PRO CSV, on a separate page.

Updated September 27, 2026

Docs

Install WP Visibility beside Rank Math, open WP Visibility → Settings and scroll to the Import section, choose Rank Math under Import from, click Preview changes, read it, then click Import now. Rank Math’s rows are read and never changed, so it still works if you reactivate it. Deactivate Rank Math once the live pages check out.

Before you start

  • Take a database backup. The import writes WP Visibility’s post meta, term meta and three settings, and cannot reverse itself.
  • Export redirections first, while Rank Math is active, if you use its Redirections module. The SEO import does not move them. See Redirections below.
  • Both plugins print head tags while both are active. Import and deactivate in one sitting, or work on staging.
  • Rank Math does not need to be active, but its settings must still be in the database: the settings screen and the REST route look for Rank Math’s options, not the plugin. If Rank Math was deleted along with its settings, the settings screen does not offer it under Import from, and the REST route answers that no importable data was found.

What comes across

The import reads per-post SEO from ordinary post meta under these rank_math_* keys; an empty field is skipped.

Rank Math field WP Visibility field
rank_math_title Search title
rank_math_description Search description
rank_math_canonical_url Canonical URL
rank_math_facebook_title Social title
rank_math_facebook_description Social description
rank_math_facebook_image_id Social image
rank_math_twitter_title X title
rank_math_twitter_description X description
rank_math_robots Search engine indexing, Link following

Robots. The import reads the list stored in rank_math_robots and takes two entries from it: noindex becomes Noindex and nofollow becomes Nofollow. No other robots choice is imported (index, noarchive, nosnippet, noimageindex, the max preview values), and a post with neither entry keeps inheriting the WP Visibility site policy.

Categories, tags and other terms. The import reads term SEO from term meta under the same key names. It finds every term that has a Rank Math title, across all taxonomies, and reads its title, description, canonical, noindex and Facebook image. Rank Math is the one source whose term social image comes across.

Settings. Three: the title separator (read as a character; an HTML entity is decoded), the homepage title and the homepage meta description. The two templates are translated from Rank Math’s single-percent syntax (Rank Math’s variable list, checked September 27, 2026):

Rank Math WP Visibility
%sitename% {site}
%sitedesc% {tagline}
%title% {title}
%sep% {sep}
%excerpt%, %excerpt_only% {excerpt}
%category% {category}
%page% {page}
%currentyear% {currentyear}
%customfield(key)% {custom_field:key}

Any other Rank Math variable (%date%, %modified%, %term%, %name%, %pt_single%, %focuskw%, and the rest) is not translated and is removed from the translated text rather than left in a live title. WP Visibility has its own {date}, {modified}, {author} and {post_type_singular} if you want to add some back by hand. Per-post titles and descriptions go through the same translation.

What stays behind

  • Focus keywords, the content analysis score, schema templates and custom schema, rich result settings, Content AI data, analytics and rank tracking.
  • Per post type and taxonomy templates, archive templates, social defaults, the local SEO and knowledge graph settings, verification codes, sitemap settings and global robots defaults. Set these in WP Visibility after the import.
  • Robots directives beyond noindex and nofollow, a separate Twitter image, and an image given as an external URL.
  • Redirections, which have their own path below.

Which posts are found

The import looks for posts with a Rank Math title stored. A post with only a description, a canonical or a robots choice and no title is not found and keeps WP Visibility’s defaults. Check a post or two you know were set that way before deactivating Rank Math, and set the value by hand or with wp visibility set <id> --description="...".

Preview, then import

From the settings screen. WP Visibility → Settings, Import section, Import from: Rank Math, Preview changes. The preview checks up to 5,000 posts per click, counts the posts whose mapped values would change and shows the first ten, title and description before and after, with variables already translated. Nothing is written until you click Import now.

From the command line.

wp visibility import rank-math --dry-run --user=admin
wp visibility import rank-math --user=admin

Over REST, POST /wp-json/wpvis/v1/import/run with source: "rankmath" (no hyphen there) defaults to dry_run: true; send dry_run: false, then repeat with offset raised by 200 each call until remaining is 0. The route needs manage_options and does not pass through the review queue.

The live run processes posts in batches of 200. The first batch also applies the three settings and every mapped term; the preview covers posts only, so check a category page and the homepage afterward. Posts whose values already match are skipped. A second run after you have edited titles in WP Visibility puts Rank Math’s values back, so import once, then edit in one place.

Redirections

The SEO import never reads Rank Math’s redirections. Rank Math PRO exports them as a CSV: Rank Math SEO → Redirections → Import & Export, then Export CSV on the Export tab (Rank Math’s CSV guide, checked September 27, 2026). WP Visibility’s redirect import recognizes that file by its source and destination header columns and reads matching, type and status:

  • exact and regex rows import; a source written as /old-page[exact] has its marker stripped.
  • contains, start and end rows have no equivalent and are skipped with a message naming the row. Rewrite those as regular expressions before or after the import.
  • Rows whose status is not active are skipped.

A CSV export in free Rank Math is not documented on the vendor’s own pages as of September 27, 2026; the same guide describes the feature as PRO only. Without PRO, copy the rules from the Redirections screen into a three-column file, source,target,status, one rule per line. Either file goes in on the Redirects page (turn on Redirects under WP Visibility → Settings → Modules first; it is off by default), preview first: Redirect a Changed URL.

After the import

  1. View the source of ten URLs you know: homepage, two posts with custom titles, a noindexed page, a category, a tag, a page with a custom canonical. Check the title, description, canonical and robots line.
  2. Set what the import does not carry: Set Title and Description Templates.
  3. Deactivate Rank Math. Rank Math’s uninstall guide says deactivating and deleting the plugin leave its data in the database; for full removal it tells you to add its rank_math_clear_data_on_uninstall filter before deleting (checked September 27, 2026). Add that filter only once you are sure.
  4. The import does not clear WP Visibility’s sitemap cache, so run wp visibility flush (or save any post), then resubmit the sitemap at /sitemap.xml: Submit Your Sitemap.

Field names checked against the WP Visibility importer on September 27, 2026.