Installing and setting up the WordPress plugin

Installing

Search for SolSEO in Plugins, Add new, install and activate. It needs no account and no licence key, and it will not ask you for either. PHP 7.4 is the minimum, so it installs on older hosting rather than refusing.

Importing from Yoast or Rank Math

Open SolSEO, Import. It reads both plugins through their own meta keys and shows a dry run diff before it writes anything. It copies rather than moves, so the plugin you came from keeps its data and switching back is a deactivation.

Run the dry run first and read it. A site with a custom title template is the usual source of surprises, and the diff is where you will see that rather than after the fact.

What the free plugin does

Editor scoring in both the Yoast and Rank Math styles, meta titles and descriptions, social tags, XML sitemaps, redirects with a 404 log, image alt tools, and schema including variation aware WooCommerce product schema.

Deciding about pairing

Pairing is optional and reversible. A paired site shows its tracked positions and Search Console figures inside wp-admin and puts audit findings on the post and product list tables. Those are your account's own figures, which is why a paid plan is what unlocks them.

The bulk meta tools, the Merchant Center readiness checks and the faceted URL controller are in SolSEO Pro and are unlocked by a licence key rather than by a plan, because all three are worked out on your own site and need nothing from us.

The direction matters: the plugin polls SolSEO, and SolSEO never opens a connection to your WordPress. A site behind a firewall, a staging password or a maintenance plugin works exactly like a public one, and there is no inbound credential stored on our side.

See the pairing page for the step by step.

Running it beside another SEO plugin

The free plugin is built to sit beside Yoast, Rank Math or All in One SEO rather than to replace one.

Two plugins both writing a title tag is a real conflict. Ours detects it and reports it rather than overwriting silently. Decide which one owns output and let the other advise, which is a decision you make once and then forget.

That is also why the importer copies rather than moves. Switching back is a deactivation, not a migration.

What the plugin does not do

It does not need a licence key to be useful. Everything above works with no account at all.

It does not phone home with your content. It sends what the screens it draws need, and nothing about your posts, users, orders or customers.

It does not slow the front end. The wp-admin screens read a cache of what was last fetched, so a page load never waits on a network call to us.

Minimum requirements

PHP 7.4 and WordPress 6.0. Deliberately low, because the sites that most need a free SEO plugin are often the ones on older hosting, and refusing to install is not a useful error message.