Why it works this way
Nobody wants to run an import. What people actually want is for the titles and descriptions they already wrote to keep working. Reading rather than copying achieves that, and it avoids the usual problems with imports.Your values always win
Editing a field in Rankify overrides whatever the old plugin had, permanently, with no merge step to think about.
Nothing is destroyed
Deactivate Rankify and the old plugin is exactly as it was. There is no half-migrated state to recover from.
It survives uninstalling
The values live in post meta that outlives the plugin, so it keeps working after you remove the old one.
It costs nothing
One meta read per field, from the cache already primed for the post being rendered.
What is read
For each, Rankify reads the SEO title, meta description, canonical URL, focus keyword, and the social title, description, and image.
All in One SEO version 4 moved its data into its own table rather than post meta, so it is handled separately from the others.
The switch
1
Install and activate Rankify
Leave the other plugin in place for now.
2
Run the setup wizard
It reports what existing SEO data it found. Nothing is imported; it is telling you what will be used as a fallback.
3
Check a few pages
Look at pages where you wrote a custom title or description. View source and confirm the title is the one you wrote, not a generated one.
4
Deactivate the other plugin
Do not put this off. Two SEO plugins both output titles, descriptions, and social tags, and search engines see duplicates.
5
Check the same pages again
They should be unchanged, because Rankify is reading the same stored values.
What does not carry over
Reading covers per-post meta. Some things are configuration rather than content, and you set those up once in Rankify.Redirects from the old plugin
Redirect rules are not read as a fallback, because a redirect is behavior rather than a value on a post. Export them from the old plugin as CSV, then import on Rankify > Redirects & Links. Do this before deactivating it, since the export screen goes with the plugin.Turning the fallback off
Reading existing values is controlled by a setting, on by default. Turn it off once you are confident every page you care about has its own Rankify values, or if you want to be certain nothing is inherited.Turning it off does not delete anything. It only stops Rankify reading the other plugin’s meta, so pages without their own values fall back to your templates instead.
After the switch
1
Resubmit your sitemap
The URL is
https://example.com/sitemap.xml. It may differ from your old plugin’s, and Search Console should be pointed at the current one.2
Check your robots.txt
Visit
/robots.txt and confirm it references the right sitemap and contains no rules left over from the old plugin.3
Validate your schema
Run a page through the Rich Results Test to confirm one clean graph, and that the old plugin is not still emitting one.
4
Watch for 404s
The 404 monitor catches anything that broke, ranked by how often it is requested.
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