Prime SEO reads the titles, descriptions and keywords Yoast stored for every post (24 fields, plus your homepage titles and any Premium redirects) and copies them in one click, while Yoast stays installed until you have compared the two. It weighs 2 MB against Yoast’s 22 and shows no premium prompts; the AI crawler switches write real rules to robots.txt.
Three quotes from one- and two-star reviews on WordPress.org, out of the 300 most recent ones we read on September 22, 2026. Links go to the original reviews.
“over many years it has become bloated, cluttered, noisy, distracting, and constantly trying to upsell”
Review on WordPress.org, January 10, 2024
“They’re updating so you’ll buy their premium version.”
Review on WordPress.org, June 20, 2025
“I am in the process of moving away from Yoast because of it’s terribly slow performance”
Review on WordPress.org, November 19, 2024
delayed-premium-upsell.php)File counts and sizes: the plugin folders from WordPress.org, measured on September 22, 2026. The GPTBot finding: our file-by-file read of five free SEO plugins.
The Migration Tool reads Yoast’s own data. Nothing in Yoast is deleted, so you can compare both plugins before switching off the old one.
| Yoast data | Fields | Imported |
|---|---|---|
| SEO title, meta description, focus keyword, extra keywords | 4 | ✓ Yes |
| Canonical URL and robots: noindex, nofollow, noarchive, nosnippet, noimageindex, advanced | 7 | ✓ Yes |
| Open Graph title, description, image; Twitter title, description, image | 8 | ✓ Yes |
| Schema page type and article type, primary category, breadcrumb title, cornerstone flag | 5 | ✓ Yes |
| Homepage title and description (Yoast variables converted), organization name for schema | site settings | ✓ Yes |
| Redirects from Yoast SEO Premium | table | ✓ Yes |
| Readability scores, internal linking suggestions, Yoast-specific blocks (FAQ, How-to) | — | ✕ Not imported |
Field list from class-prime-seo-migration.php in Prime SEO 1.2.0: the meta keys _yoast_wpseo_title through _yoast_wpseo_bctitle, the wpseo_titles option and the yoast_seo_redirects table.
A switch costs an afternoon. These are the reasons not to make it.
Yoast free grades prose: sentence length, passive voice, transition words. Prime SEO scores SEO signals only, 14 checks folded into one number from 0 to 100. Readability is not graded.
Yoast reports 10 million active installs in the directory and has add-ons for WooCommerce, news and video. Prime SEO is a 2026 plugin with a fraction of that install base and one developer answering support.
The Yoast SEO 28.5 readme lists “LLMs.txt management” in the free plugin and says “the bot blocker in Premium lets you control which AI crawlers can use your content for training.” Prime SEO has both in the free version, plus llms-full.txt and a log of which AI crawlers came.
yoursite.com/sitemap.xml./sitemap.xml instead of /sitemap_index.xml). Keep the Yoast 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 Yoast without importing first, which leaves posts with no meta description for a while. Import, verify, then deactivate.
No. The Migration Tool reads Yoast’s own data and copies it. It deletes nothing. If you reactivate Yoast, everything is where it was.
They are imported from the yoast_seo_redirects table into Prime SEO’s redirect manager, which is free and includes a 404 monitor.
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 Yoast 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. Yoast stays active until you switch it off.
Install Free on WordPress.org Read the Migration Tool documentation →