Dilemma with meta descriptions

  • I am in the process of deciding how to implement meta descriptions on my site. The All in One SEO and Yoast plugins seem too big for this purpose and feel like an overkill, plus they inundate you with ads. I want a simple and lightweight solution that will allow an original meta description for every post and page. I found a couple of plugins, one of which is Easy WP Meta Description. It looks well-maintained and lightweight, but this part gives me pause:

    “When [the plugin is] deleted, uninstall script runs, which deletes all changes in the database performed by the plugin. If you don’t want to delete your descriptions and other settings only deactivate and don’t delete.”

    Am I the only one who sees an issue with this? If the author of the plugin abandons it and leaves me unable to keep WordPress up-to-date, I’ll obviously have no choice but to uninstall it, which will result in losing custom-written meta description. Sounds unwise.

    Do all plugins work like that? There has to be some kind of insurance that if you are forced to switch to another plugin in the future, your work won’t be lost, right? Any suggestions?

    • This topic was modified 1 year, 8 months ago by Knocks.
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  • Any good pluign will remove it’s data when it’s deleted.

    In this particular case, the issue that you’d have is that each SEO pluign will store the data in different ways. As an example, one may use a meta key of ‘seo_meta_value’, one may use a meta key of ‘seo_meta_desc’, another one ‘seo_met_des’, and another one might store it in a separate custom database table. There’s no “one rule” that will apply to the data from every plugin, so there’s no way of converting between each one (unless there’s a converter/importer available).

    Also, if a plugin doesn’t get maintained and might be “abandoned” (or maybe not), that doesn’t stop WordPress from updating. WordPress will update anyway, and the worst thing that would happen is that you might have an incompatibility with the older plugin. That’s a possibility for pretty much any theme or plugin, so which ever one you choose may have that in the future. Having said that, the bigger ones that are backed by commercial offerings are more likely to stick around for longer. If they have more features than you need now, just don’t use the features that you don’t want. ??

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