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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 22, 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. Detection looks at its options and rows, not the plugin.

What comes across

Rank Math stores per-post SEO as ordinary post meta under rank_math_* keys. These are read; 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. Rank Math keeps all of a post’s robots choices in one serialized list. The import reads two entries from it: noindex becomes Noindex and nofollow becomes Nofollow. Everything else in that list (noarchive, nosnippet, noimageindex, the max preview values) is not imported, and a post with neither entry keeps inheriting the WP Visibility site policy.

Categories, tags and other terms. Rank Math writes term SEO as term meta with the same key names. The import 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 (Rank Math stores the character itself, sometimes as an HTML entity, which is decoded), the homepage title and the homepage meta description. The two templates are translated from Rank Math’s single-percent syntax:

Rank Math WP Visibility
%sitename% {site}
%sitedesc% {tagline}
%title% {title}
%sep% {sep}
%excerpt%, %excerpt_only% {excerpt}
%primary_category%, %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) has no equivalent and is removed from the translated text rather than left in a live title. 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 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 and follow offset 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

Rank Math keeps redirections in its own table, and the SEO import never reads it. Rank Math PRO exports them as a CSV: Rank Math SEO → Redirections → Import & Export, then Export CSV on the Export tab. WP Visibility’s redirect import recognizes that file by its header (id,source,matching,destination,type,category,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.

Free Rank Math has no CSV export. 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, preview first: Redirect a Changed URL. Rank Math’s export path checked against its knowledge base on September 22, 2026.

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. Its data stays in the database on deactivation. Rank Math offers to remove its data when you delete the plugin, so delete only once you are sure.
  4. Resubmit the sitemap at /sitemap.xml: Submit Your Sitemap.

Field names checked against the WP Visibility importer on September 22, 2026.