When it is about WordPress SEO plugins, there are two famous and popular plugins which anyone who works with WordPress should know it.
The first in Yoast which has over 5 million active installations and this is very much. The Yoast is trusted by many creators all over the world. By all these statistics we can be sure that Yoast is one the best WordPress SEO plugins.
The Second is Rank Math Which is sort of new in the market, but many reviews are confirming this plugin. Its good and handy features make increases its popularity and this keeps growing.
It’s confusing for beginner users to choose between these two powerful plugins, which one is better for us to use, why we should use these plugins, and so forth. In this paper, I will review these two plugins by different dimensions.
How do WordPress SEO plugins help us?
Only SEO plugins are not enough to continue the SEO strategy, it just helps us while we’re creating content. The basic guidelines like title text, keyword density, meta description, content readability, length of the content, image alt text, and so forth.
Also, these plugins aid us to create necessary files like sitemap.xml and robots.txt, and many more. As well as this feature, these plugins help us to optimize our posts and increase our rank.
Rank Math Introduction
As you know Rank Math is one of the best SEO plugins. In the next, I will review some features of this plugin.
Rank Math Features:
- Easy and simple setup wizard
- Very simple User Interface
- Modular Framework
- Code optimized for speed
- Great support
- Bulk Edit Titles & Descriptions of All Your Content
Yoast introduction
Yoast is one of the best SEO plugins all over the world. This plugin is available since 2008 and it has helped millions of users. Anyone who works with WordPress should use SEO plugins. Yoast is one of the most downloaded plugins. As a result, we can be sure about this plugin. The most important advantage of this plugin is being friendly with beginners.
Some of Yoast plugin’s features:
- The SEO analysis
- Readability Analysis
- Snippet preview for Desktop and Mobile
- The most advanced XML Sitemaps functionality at the push of a button.
- Full control over site’s breadcrumbs
- Canonical URL to avoid duplicate content
- Indexables feature introduced from 14.0 version
Setup wizard of these two plugins:
Rank Math:
Ranks math has three ways to install this plugin. The first is easy and the second is advanced; The third is Pro mode which is unavailable yet.
In the Easy mode, there are 4 steps to get through but in the Advanced, there are 6 steps. After this step, we are required to site name, advanced optimization, search console details, sitemap configuration, and confirmation of the setting.
Yoast:
In the Yoast plugin, there are 8 steps to get through. Also, in this plugin, you have required some basic settings like site name, site type, search engine visibility, title setting, and so forth. There is a difference in this setup wizard; There is a video to help us during the setup wizard and this is so helpful especially for beginners.
In conclusion, we can say both plugins are quite simple to set up; Of course, that video in Yoast is a great feature.
Also, Rank math has more options like search console and sitemap which can help us to automate our SEO task.
Plugins’ user interface
The user interface is a vital part of everything. A clean and organized UI (User Interface) provides more users. Let’s talk about the user interfaces of these two plugins.
Rank Math:
Rank math has a clean and very organized dashboard. You can use any feathers by these boxes. Also, this cleanliness improves the UX (User Experience) too.
In conclusion, I think Rank Math provides a better user interface and it’s very easy to use.
Yoast:
I think Yoast has insisted more on functionality than beauty. Of course, you can do everything with an organized menu and options but we can’t say that Yoast UI is perfect.
Keyword Assignment of Plugins
Keyword assignment allows us to set the focus keyword of the content, write title and meta description, set the permalink. This part is one important part of SEO. Both Rank Math and Yoast plugin allow you to assign keyword, title, and meta, permalink and apply different methods to show you how your content looks on the Google page.
Rank Math Interface
Rank Math InterfaceYou can only choose one keyword in the free version of Yoast and if you want to choose multiple keywords, you have to buy a premium version; While in Rank Math, you can easily choose 5 keywords and create your content. To use this option, you need to create an account first, which is free.
In Yoast, your score is shown by three-color; Red, orange, and green. Once your content color turns green, you’re good to go. But in the Rank Math, your score is shown by a numerical system (0-100). Once your content score is above 80, the color turns green.
In the next you’ll see some features that two plugins support:
- Keyword Density
- H1 & H2 Title Recommendations
- Internal & External Links
- Content Readability
- Image Alt Tags
Yoast Interface
Yoast InterfaceThere is a big difference between these two plugins that are in Rank Math if you enter a word for Keyword, it starts to suggest you some keyword automatically and it’s a very good feature which Yoast doesn’t have.
Content Analysis Readability
One of the important things about content is its legibility. You can see the Readability feature in both plugins but there are some features in Yoast that, it doesn’t exist in Rank Math.
It covers some problem such as:
- Using the same word at the start of each title.
- Writing paragraphs that are too long.
- Content that uses too much passive voice.
- Good header distribution.
By fixing these problems in contents, your content improves and it’s easier to read
Differences between performance
In this dimension we cannot say which one is better, many users say there are no differences between them. But Rank Math claims itself a well-coded, fast, efficient, and lightweight.
In this table I collect some information about these two plugins:
| Plugin / Task | Rank Math | Yoast |
| Number of files | 415 | 1075 |
| Number of lines of code | 29.6k | 95k |
| Plugin size | 8.5MB | 26.4MB |
| Number of features | More | Less |
Schema Markup
One of the important things in aligning your websites and structuring data is to use Schema.org. The good thing about Rank Math is that it provides full schema support for any content on your website. With the schema, structuring your data couldn’t be easier.
On the other hand, the Yoast plugin completely skips this function and forces you to install another plugin to work with the schema.
Of course, installing one plugin to handle both SEO and Schema is better than handle with two plugins.
WooCommerce SEO Tools
Anyone who wants to have an online store should be familiar with WooCommerce. With WooCommerce you can convert your site into an online shop. Creating listings, adding products, configuring payment gateways can be easily done with WooCommerce.
Yoast supports this great feature in its premium version but a great thing about Rank Math is that it provides these features for free. It worth mentioning that Rank Math provides near-identical functionality compared to Yoast for free.
XML Sitemaps
In this subject, both plugins have done great work and offer great flexibility. Also in both plugins, users can customize sitemaps, remove category types in bulk. XML sitemaps are not quit beautiful in our eyes, but both Rank Math and Yoast have done their best to have clean looking sitemaps.
Price
The next subject is Price. Rank Math is completely free; There is a premium version for Rank Math but it hasn’t been published yet. On the other hand, to full access to all features, you have to buy a premium version.
Google Search Console
When we talk about this feature, Rank Math makes it so much easier. Like we said earlier, you can integrate Google Search Console in the setup process. All you have to do is verify your Gmail account and it will show your Search Console Data in your dashboard.
Yoast also allows us to integrate Google Search Console but there isn’t any place to see your daily data directly.
404 Monitor
Another good feature in Rank Math is its 404 monitor page. This section looks for pages that return a 404 error. You can easily find these page and fix or delete it. This feature helps you to improve your SEO and also improve your UX (User Experience).
On the other hand, again Yoast plugin completely skips this feature and that’s not good.
Updates
When it comes to updates, Rank Math publishes more updates. After frequent updates, you can judge it in two ways; The first is a bad way, Rank Math may have too many bugs and it has to publish updates to remove those bugs. The second is that they are trying to stay up to date.
Rank Math itself, says they are trying to keep with Google’s updates and algorithms change. For instance, they published Schema Markups after Google’s update and removed the readability option after Google’s BERT update.
Conclusion
The choice is yours. After all these comparisons, you should notice that there isn’t any significant difference between Rank Math and Yoast.
I choose Rank Math because it’s easy to use and it has a friendly UI and UX; It’s my choice and yours, might be different.
On the other hand, it has been a long time since the Yoast was published. So, there is more trust in Yoast.
If you are using the premium version of the Yoast plugin, it is better not to switch to Rank Math. But if you are using the free version of the Yoast plugin, you may want to try both plugins and choose your final decision after a while.
