Rankings usually don’t drop because you switched WordPress SEO plugins — they drop because the switch was done out of order: two plugins active at once, or the old one deactivated before its data was copied over. This checklist keeps NexalSEO’s built-in Yoast/Rank Math importer in the right sequence.
What actually causes rankings to slip during a migration
Three things, in order of how often they happen: running two SEO plugins at once, which usually means duplicate meta tags and duplicate XML sitemaps competing for the same URLs; deactivating the old plugin before its titles, descriptions and noindex flags are copied, which silently reverts pages to generic auto-generated titles; and losing manually-set 301 redirects that pointed old, since-removed URLs at their replacements. None of these are caused by switching plugins itself — they’re caused by skipping a step in the switch.
Before you touch anything: a 10-minute audit
List your highest-traffic pages
Pull your top 20–30 pages by organic traffic from Search Console or analytics. These are the pages you’ll spot-check after migrating, since they’re where a lost title tag or dropped noindex flag would do the most damage.
Note any manual redirects
If your current plugin manages 301 redirects, export or screenshot that list first. NexalSEO’s importer moves on-page SEO meta, not the old plugin’s redirect table, so those need to be re-created by hand in NexalSEO’s redirect manager afterward.
Leave the old plugin active for now
Don’t deactivate Yoast SEO or Rank Math yet — the importer reads its data directly from the database while it’s still installed. Deactivating early doesn’t delete that data, but it removes the point of doing an import first.
The switch itself
Install NexalSEO and run the setup wizard
Install NexalSEO from Plugins → Add New, activate it, and complete the setup wizard — it will detect that another SEO plugin is active and warn you before you go further. Full first-run walkthrough on the Getting Started page.
Run the built-in importer
On the NexalSEO dashboard, choose Yoast SEO or Rank Math as the source and run the import. It copies, per post and page: SEO title, meta description, focus keyword, Open Graph title/description/image, and the noindex/nofollow robots flags — plus the taxonomy-level equivalents of the same fields for your categories and tags.
Spot-check the pages from your traffic list
Open the top-traffic pages you listed earlier and confirm the title, meta description and any noindex setting carried over correctly. This is the check that catches an incomplete import before it goes live, not after.
Re-create your redirects
Add the manual 301s you noted in the audit step to NexalSEO’s redirect manager — it supports unlimited redirects with regex and CSV import, so a large redirect list can go in as one file instead of one row at a time.
Deactivate the old plugin
Only now, deactivate Yoast SEO or Rank Math. Running both simultaneously past this point is what produces duplicate meta tags and duplicate sitemaps — see the setup FAQ on the Getting Started page for why that specifically hurts rankings.
Resubmit your sitemap in Search Console
NexalSEO generates its own XML sitemap at a new URL. Submit it in Search Console alongside (not replacing, until Google has crawled it) the old plugin’s sitemap, so indexing doesn’t have a gap while the switch propagates.
After the switch: what to watch for two to four weeks
Check Search Console’s Coverage and Performance reports weekly for a month. A brief dip in impressions during the first few days as Google re-crawls updated meta tags is normal; a sustained drop in indexed pages, or a spike in “not indexed” errors, usually means a redirect or noindex flag didn’t carry over the way it was supposed to — go back to the affected URL and check its NexalSEO settings directly rather than waiting it out.
Not sure NexalSEO is the right destination?
See how the importer, redirect manager and free feature set compare against Yoast, Rank Math and All in One SEO on the NexalSEO vs other plugins page before you commit to the switch.
The Yoast/Rank Math importer and the redirect manager are both free, with no limit on pages or redirects.
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