Migrating · 6 min read

Migrating from Yoast SEO

Move post meta, global settings and redirections from Yoast SEO to Omni SEO without losing data.

The Yoast importer copies data into Omni SEO's own meta keys. It never deletes Yoast data, and it only writes where Yoast actually had a value, so an existing Omni SEO value is never silently replaced by an empty one.

What gets imported

Post, page, product and custom post type meta: SEO title, meta description, focus keyword, canonical, robots flags, Open Graph and Twitter overrides.
Term meta for categories, tags and custom taxonomies.
Global settings: title and description templates, separator, knowledge graph entity, social profiles, indexing rules.
Redirections created in Yoast Premium, including regex rules.

Variable syntax is rewritten

Yoast uses %%variable%% syntax; Omni SEO uses %variable%. The importer rewrites every recognised variable as it copies, and leaves anything it does not recognise untouched so you can review it.

before / after

Yoast:     %%title%% %%page%% %%sep%% %%sitename%%
Omni SEO:  %title% %page% %sep% %sitename%

Running the import

Back up your database.
Go to Omni SEO → Tools → Import.
Yoast SEO will be listed with the number of posts and terms detected.
Select Import and leave the tab open — progress is written in batches so a reload will resume rather than restart.
Review a handful of posts, then deactivate Yoast SEO.

shell

wp omniseo import yoast --dry-run
wp omniseo import yoast

Do not delete Yoast until you have checked

Deactivating Yoast is reversible; deleting it removes its data. Keep it deactivated for a week or two until you are confident the import is complete.

After the import

Flush the sitemap cache, then spot-check a product page, a category archive and the homepage. If a template still shows a raw variable, edit it in Omni SEO → Search Appearance — the variable picker lists every supported replacement.