To remove yoast database tables, you have to find them in phpmyadmin of MySQL Database of WordPress. These are left over even after deleting the plugin.
Yoast plugin is one of the best wordpress seo plugins with more than 5+ million installs as of March 2022. It also provides facility to include seo title and meta description. In addition you get advanced XML sitemaps, schema integration, rich snippet results and many others.
One of the key advantages is its fast loading speed compared to other seo plugins. I like its simplistic features, not complicated with too many details. I have been using it for more than 10 years and found it useful for its readability feature.
If you are using its premium features, then you can do internal links for best seo efforts. In addition you get excellent technical support. But in 2022, a lot of other plugins have taken its place.
What is the Con of Yoast Plugin?
One of the main disadvantages of the Yoast SEO plugin is that it doesn’t completely uninstall. Lot of database transients remain even after the regular uninstall of the plugin. The premium version supports complete uninstall.
When you change to a new seo plugin, your WordPress site database still contains some remnants of Yoast plugin tables and entries.
This is a bad WordPress practice of many plugins. When you uninstall a plugin, you expect that all the entries from front-end and back-end are completely removed.
On the contrary site owners and wordpress admins are kept in the dark. Also, it is not a good practice to keep more than one seo plugin on a site. It may give negative signals to search engines of seo meta data.
In this guide, we are going to see the steps to completely uninstall Yoast SEO plugin from your WordPress site.
Step #1 – Delete all the Yoast Related Tables Manually
The following tables are there in the database before deletion.
- _yoast_indexable
- _yoast_indexable_hierarchy
- _yoast_migrations
- _yoast_primary_term
- _yoast_seo_links
- _yoast_seo_meta
After normal deletion of the plugin also, these tables remain in the database of my site. To check on a double-note, clear your browser cache and log into your phpmyadmin panel. Check if the same db tables are existing.
Select the 6 tables and DROP from the list box. This will delete all the above tables.
Step #2 – Delete Yoast entries in POSTMETA table
But the job is half-done.
- Search for _postmeta table for any remnants of yoast entries.
- Select the table on the left hand side and click on Search at the top of phpmyadmin.
- For meta_key enter the value %yoast% and click on Go.
- There were 378 entries in this table for my site.
- Select the number of rows check box to fit on one page if possible and click on check all.
- Then, click the Delete button.
All the database entries related to Yoast in the _postmeta table are removed. To check it, do the above process again and you should get zero entries.
The database size also reduced a lot. Now you can install a new seo plugin like Rank Math that does give boosting benefits in 2022.
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