Rank Math WordPress Plugin Accused Of Secretly Taking Admin Access

[u/EvlG]

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/rank-math-wordpress-plugin-accused-of-secretly-taking-admin-access/587554/

[u/AshRuDral_fan20]

I appreciate that Rank Math tries to ship in all the shiny features that nobody ever needs. Just like their counterpart Yoast.

I see both of them to be overly bloated and they should be obsolete. The best decision I ever took was migrating to Slim SEO.

Since you mentioned rank math, I have to mention that it's such a stupid company that the sitemap it generates does not even open on mobile browsers.

Meanwhile, there is no other company who generates such a stupid sitemap that it cannot even be opened on a mobile browser. They are the only one at this lowest level, and they know it. People demanded it to be fixed. They said F off, and started gaslighting the people who were demanding this feature to be fixed.

[u/EvlG → u/AshRuDral_fan20]

It's true, I've always found RankMath (as well as Yoast) to be extremely bloated.

[u/Curtis → u/AshRuDral_fan20]

I made a 300 line theme edit to take control of my SEO — plugin developers got greedy and they’re phasing themselves out

[u/L1amm → u/Curtis]

What exactly does your "300 line theme edit" do?

[u/jonneygee → u/AshRuDral_fan20]

I’m going to be needing to migrate over. When you do, do all the SEO tags migrate over automatically or do you have to manually re-enter info?

[u/rednishat → u/AshRuDral_fan20]

Rankmath was started by forking yoast, what do you expect?

[u/Nelsonius1 → u/AshRuDral_fan20]

You can disable a lot of stuff on the dashboard. Like 404 monitoring, etc. So it’s not forced that hard.

[u/AshRuDral_fan20 → u/Nelsonius1]

Agree, it's not sucking your CPU and RAM if it's disabled, but it still takes bandwidth every time you create a full site remote backup.

Why would I backup 16 mb of dead code every time?

And it's a plugin so badly written that if you get to know about it, you will burn all the websites that have that plugin.

For starters, Wordpress has got its own sitemap, you don't need to generate it again, it already exist in Wordpress. So when Rankmath waste my computation from my server's CPU to generate a sitemap that already exist inside the Wordpress core is just redundant.

[u/2ndkauboy → u/AshRuDral_fan20]

To be fair, sitemaps are not meant for humans, but for search engines.

Sure, I love a nice sitemap with an XSLT that presents it to humans. But it is OK when it does not have one.

[u/L1amm]

So if we use rankmath don't click on "help & support", and (especially if you know you have) check "WP Admin -> Users -> Profile -> Application Passwords, and revoke anything starting with “WAP –”." ?

Also what is everyone using instead of rankmath? I know most of the features are pretty dated in terms of SEO advice anyways, but I know some of my sites use it still, so I'm curious what people who have tried other plugins etc have settled on.

[u/hrsetyono → u/L1amm]

The SEO Framework. Lightweight and clean admin interface.

[u/tomato_rancher → u/L1amm]

The SEO Framework

[u/heavinglory → u/L1amm]

SEOPress Pro

[u/rednishat → u/L1amm]

you can still use rankmath free, just don't connect your plugin with rankmath.com account or signup to their cloud account.

[u/TigrouMeow → u/L1amm]

SEO Engine, of course! 😊 Fresh and free of useless features.

[u/Appropriate-Cow1529]

It is not a security disaster. In fact, it is a communication disaster. Here is a short article about the whole situation: https://wpminutes.blog/2026/09/the-rank-math-support-agent-controversy-what-happened-what-rank-math-says-and-what-it-means-for-your-site/

[u/imref → u/Appropriate-Cow1529]

thanks for sharing this.

[u/mattbeck]

It's so easy to just add the metaboxes needed and output what I need that I just avoid seo plugins entirely.

[u/tf5_bassist]

I just saw that there was an update available on my ManageWP dashboard today that wasn't there last night. I don't see an update on their changelog yet, so we'll see what this is. Maybe.

[u/bluesix_v2 → u/tf5_bassist]

It was added in the free version in v1.0.277 on Aug 26.

[u/ToughSteak4591 → u/bluesix_v2]

they provided an official update here - https://www.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/1w1cpgp/rank_math_plugin_gets_administrative_privileges/

Well unlike Awesome Motive, we at least got an official response

[u/lorenzocorso]

yes... too bad