SEOPress is a well-liked plugin, and this page says so. Prime SEO reads the titles, descriptions, keywords, robots and social settings SEOPress stored for every post (21 fields, plus redirects) and copies them in one click, while SEOPress stays installed until you have compared the two. What Prime SEO adds is the AI crawler side: per-bot robots rules and a visit log, both free.
SEOPress collects few complaints: 42 one- and two-star reviews on WordPress.org in nine years, against 300 or more for each of the big three. Two of them, linked to the originals.
“The AI support tool could be helpful, but it often struggles to understand the plugin’s own options and navigation structure.”
Review on WordPress.org, February 12, 2026
“finally it just stuck on 400 error with no preview at all”
Review on WordPress.org, March 31, 2025
File counts and sizes: the plugin folders from WordPress.org, measured on September 22, 2026 (SEOPress 10.2). The crawler finding: our file-by-file read of five free SEO plugins.
The Migration Tool reads SEOPress’s own data. Nothing in SEOPress is deleted, so you can compare both plugins before switching off the old one.
| SEOPress data | Fields | Imported |
|---|---|---|
| SEO title, meta description, target keyword | 3 | ✓ Yes |
| Canonical URL and robots: index, follow, archive, snippet, imageindex, ODP; primary category; breadcrumbs | 9 | ✓ Yes |
| Facebook title, description, image; Twitter title, description, image | 6 | ✓ Yes |
| Per-post redirects (enabled, type, target) | 3 | ✓ Yes |
Redirects stored as seopress_404 entries |
table | ✓ Yes |
| Content analysis results, Pro schema templates, Google Analytics settings | — | ✕ Not imported |
Field list from class-prime-seo-migration.php in Prime SEO 1.2.0: 21 _seopress_* post meta keys and the seopress_404 post type.
A switch costs an afternoon. These are the reasons not to make it.
SEOPress free is lean, ad-free and has llms.txt. Without a need for AI crawler control the switch buys you little. This page exists for one group: people who want per-bot switches and a visit log.
SEOPress Pro adds WooCommerce SEO, schema templates, Google Analytics dashboards and AI writing with your own API key. Prime SEO Pro is narrower. It covers AI titles and descriptions, bulk generation, a content score and a video sitemap.
SEOPress reports 300,000 active installs and a French company with a support team behind it. Prime SEO is a 2026 plugin with one developer answering support.
yoursite.com/sitemap.xml./sitemap.xml instead of /sitemaps.xml). Keep the SEOPress plugin folder for a week in case you want to compare, then delete it.Rankings depend on the tags a crawler reads in the head of the page (title, description, canonical, robots directives), and every one of them is imported unchanged, so a crawler visiting the day after the switch finds the same head section it indexed the week before.
Not from the switch itself. The tags Google reads (title, description, canonical, robots) are imported as they were. What can change rankings is deactivating SEOPress without importing first, which leaves posts with no meta description for a while. Import, verify, then deactivate.
No. The Migration Tool reads SEOPress’s own data and copies it. It deletes nothing. If you reactivate SEOPress, everything is where it was.
The free build has an llms.txt file and an Agent Readiness toggle, but no per-crawler switches: the code contains no AI crawler names, so blocking GPTBot means editing robots.txt by hand. Prime SEO writes those rules for 15 crawlers and logs their visits.
The free version has two admin notices: a review request after seven days of use and a conflict warning when another SEO plugin is active, shown only on Prime SEO’s own pages. Pro features appear as buttons where they apply, such as “Generate with AI” in the post editor. There are no banners, no popups and nothing installs itself.
For the import, yes. For a live site, no: two SEO plugins each output their own meta tags and sitemaps, and search engines get duplicates. Deactivate SEOPress once the import is verified.
The version on WordPress.org includes titles and descriptions, sitemaps, schema, redirects, 404 monitor, IndexNow, breadcrumbs, image SEO, llms.txt and the AI Bots Manager. Pro ($59 a year) adds AI-written titles and descriptions, a bulk generator, an AI content score and a video sitemap.
Install the free version, run the import, look at three posts. SEOPress stays active until you switch it off.
Install Free on WordPress.org Read the Migration Tool documentation →