How to : Completely remove yoast plugin data from WordPress

Yoast plugin is great plugin developed by Joost de Valk, This plugin is recommended by thousands of experts and authors to get higher ranking is search results. If you don’t want that plugin or you bought a Wordpress theme which comes with built in seo plugin then you may want to completely remove the yoast wp seo plugin from Wordpress installation.

So how to remove that ?.. Completely !
STEP 1 – UnInstall the plugin
The first thing we can do is Uninstalling the plugin from ‘Installed plugins’ page.

STEP 2 – Delete the files from the plugin directory
Secondly we need to remove the plugin files from the plugins directory. It is not necessary if you want to re-activate the plugin in future. This plugin uses ‘/wp-content/plugins/wordress-seo/’ file-directory to store all its files so we need to delete ‘wordress-seo’ folder using some kind of FTP-Programs.

STEP 3 – Cleaning the WordPress Database
Final step is removing all tables/rows created by yoast plugin from the database. This is a type of “only for expert” step, you need to be very careful while performing this step. A little mistake can crash your whole wordpress blog. Make sure you have Complete MySQL database back up.

To clean MySQL database follow these steps carefully :

• 1. First of all, login to phpMyAdmin control panel with login details provided by your host, then select the database you’re using for your wordpress.
• 2. Yoast stores all the information related to posts in wp_postmeta table. So you have to click on the link called “wp_postmeta” to browse the tables made by yoast_wpseo plugin.
• 3. Now you’ll find some verticle columns with names – meta_id, post_id,meta_key etc.

NOTE : Tables created by Yoast WPSEO (Only for sigle post)

• 4. All tables created by yoast wp_seo plugin are highlighted, You can see all names are starting with ‘yoast_wpseo_’ word, This is to separate the rows by yoast from rows created by other plugins.

• 5. Now you have to execute a SQL Query which will delete all the tables which have meta_key starting with yoast_wpseo

DELETE FROM wp_postmeta WHERE meta_key = '_yoast_wpseo_metadesc';

thus you can use above statment to delete the rows having meta_key value “_yoast_wpseo_metadesc”, Or you can use OR mySQL statment to choose all values at once.

Don’t forget to optimize your wordpress table after performing all steps mentioned above.