Yoast Meta Description: Add, Change, Bulk-Edit

To add or change a meta description in Yoast SEO, open the post, open the Yoast SEO box, go to Search appearance and type into the Meta description field, then click Update. To edit many at once, use Yoast SEO → Tools → Bulk editor → Search appearance. To set a default for posts you never edit, use the template under Yoast SEO → Settings → Content types.

The meta description is the short summary under the title in search results. Google does not use it for ranking, but it is often the text that persuades someone to click. This guide covers Yoast SEO step by step, the bulk editor and templates, the same jobs in Rank Math and without a plugin, and why Google sometimes ignores what you wrote.

Add or change the meta description in Yoast SEO

1. Open the post or page in the WordPress editor.
2. Open the Yoast SEO box. In the block editor, click the Yoast icon in the top-right toolbar; in the classic editor, scroll to the Yoast SEO box below the content.
3. Open Search appearance. You will see a Google preview and the SEO title, Slug and Meta description fields.
4. Type your description into Meta description. The bar under it turns from orange to green as the length falls in Yoast’s recommended range.
5. Click Update (or Publish).

To check it is live, view the page source and search for name="description", or enter the URL in the title and meta description checker.

Set a default with a Yoast template

Posts without their own description use the template for their content type. Go to Yoast SEO → Settings → Content types, open Posts (or Pages, or a custom post type) and edit the Meta description field. Variables let you pull in the post’s excerpt, title or category; for example, inserting the Excerpt variable uses each post’s excerpt as its description.

A template is better than nothing, but every description generated from one reads alike. Use it as a floor, and write descriptions by hand for the pages that get the most impressions.

Yoast’s post template is empty out of the box, and when both the post’s field and the template are empty, Yoast prints no meta description at all and Google writes the snippet itself. The same variables exist in every plugin under different names:

Variables only work in templates and fields that support them; typed into a plain text box elsewhere, they print literally.

The homepage, categories and tags

• Homepage that shows your latest posts: Yoast SEO → Settings → Content types → Homepage, then edit Meta description and click Save changes. It is empty by default.
• Static homepage: edit the page set as your homepage under Settings → Reading, exactly like any other page.
• One category or tag: Posts → Categories (or Tags), click Edit on the term, and scroll to the Yoast SEO box at the bottom of the screen. The template for all of them is under Yoast SEO → Settings → Categories & tags.

Bulk-edit meta descriptions in Yoast SEO

1. Go to Yoast SEO → Tools → Bulk editor.
2. Pick the content type and open the Search appearance tab. Each row shows a post with its SEO title and Yoast meta description, which you can edit in place.
3. Type new descriptions in the rows you want to change and click Save edits.

The bulk editor is fastest when you already know which pages to work on. Filter by post type, and start with the pages that get the most impressions in Search Console. Before a big batch, copy the existing descriptions somewhere safe: WordPress post revisions do not keep earlier meta descriptions, so there is no built-in way back to the old text. Work in small batches and check a few saved pages in the source before moving on.

In Rank Math, SEOPress, AIOSEO or without a plugin

Rank Math: open the post, click the Rank Math icon in the top-right toolbar, then Edit Snippet, and edit Description. The template for each content type is under Rank Math SEO → Titles & Meta (for posts, Single Post Description), and you can edit descriptions from the Posts list.

SEOPress: the description is on the Titles settings tab of the SEOPress box in the editor; templates are under SEO → Titles & Metas.

All in One SEO (AIOSEO): the AIOSEO Settings box below the content has the Meta Description field on its General tab; templates are under All in One SEO → Search Appearance → Content Types.

Without a plugin: WordPress has no meta description field. Some themes print the excerpt as a description; otherwise you need code. In a child theme’s functions.php or a code snippets plugin:

// Prints the post's excerpt as its meta description, when it has one.
add_action( 'wp_head', function () {
	$id = get_queried_object_id();

	if ( is_singular() && has_excerpt( $id ) ) {
		printf(
			'<meta name="description" content="%s">' . "\n",
			esc_attr( wp_strip_all_tags( get_the_excerpt( $id ) ) )
		);
	}
} );

If you later install an SEO plugin, remove this code, or the page will have two descriptions.

WooCommerce product descriptions

On WooCommerce, Yoast SEO adds the same box to the product editor, so a product’s meta description is set exactly as above. Without one, Google builds the snippet from the text on the product page.

Write a description that earns the click

• Summarize the page in one or two sentences. What will the reader get?
• Answer the search. Use the words people search with; Google highlights them in the snippet.
• Lead with the point. Mobile results show less text than desktop.
• Be specific and accurate. Prices, sizes, steps, what is included. Never promise what the page does not deliver.
• Make each one unique. Repeated descriptions across pages help no one.

Here is the difference on an illustrative guide titled “How to Descale a Breville Espresso Machine”. With an empty field and no template, Google might pull a line from the introduction: “We love our Breville, but like any machine it needs a little care from time to time, and today we are going to…”. An excerpt template does no better if the excerpt is that same introduction. A written description says what the page delivers:

Descale a Breville espresso machine in about 20 minutes: the steps for the Barista Express and Bambino, which descaler to use, and how often to do it.

That is about 150 characters, it uses the words people search for (“descale”, “Breville”), and it makes promises the page keeps. For a product, lead with what sets it apart and the facts a shopper compares: size, material, price range, delivery.

Why Google shows different text

Google uses your meta description when it is a good summary of the page for that search. Otherwise it picks text from the page, and the snippet can differ from one search to the next. So a description is not wasted when you sometimes see other text; it is a sign the description does not match those particular searches. Descriptions that are accurate, specific and written around the page’s main topic are used more often.

Two snippets are not about your description at all. “No information is available for this page” means robots.txt blocks Google from crawling the page, so it cannot read the description; fix the robots.txt rule. And if the snippet starts with a date, Google found one on the page; that is normal for posts.

Troubleshooting by symptom

The Yoast box is missing from the editor. Check Yoast SEO → Settings → Content types → Posts (or the type you are editing): if Enable SEO controls and assessments is off, Yoast hides its box for that type. In the block editor, also check the Yoast icon has not been unpinned from the top toolbar; it is still under the three-dot menu.

You saved, but the page source shows the old description. A caching plugin, your host or a CDN is serving a stored copy. Purge the cache for that page and check again in a private window.

The page source has two description tags. Search the source for name="description" and count. A second tag usually comes from another SEO plugin, the theme’s own SEO options or leftover code like the snippet above. Keep one source: Google may use either, and you cannot tell which.

Your Facebook or LinkedIn preview shows different text. Shares use the Open Graph description, which Yoast takes from the meta description unless you set one in the Social media appearance section of the Yoast sidebar. Sharing sites also cache previews, so a change can take a while to appear there.

The description is there, but Google never uses it. Compare it with the searches the page gets in Search Console. If people search for something the description never mentions, rewrite it around those searches rather than around the keyword you planned.

Which descriptions to write first

Open Performance → Search results in Search Console, switch on Average CTR and Average position, and look at the Pages tab. Pages with many impressions and a low CTR for their position are where a better title and description pay off first. The CTR calculator ranks them from a Search Console export, and the guide to changing your WordPress SEO title covers the title half of the snippet.

For descriptions on hundreds of pages, the automated meta descriptions guide covers how to draft at scale without every snippet sounding the same.

Check that it worked

Confirm the new description is in the page source, then inspect the URL in Search Console and click Request indexing. After Google recrawls the page, compare the CTR of the same queries in Performance using the Compare date option, at a similar average position.

How RankHive handles this

On a connected WordPress site, RankHive reads your Search Console every week, finds the pages that get impressions but few clicks, and drafts a meta description for each, with the query, position and current description next to the proposed one. When you approve, the RankHive plugin writes it into the meta description field of Yoast SEO, Rank Math or SEOPress, and the Change Log keeps a Revert button for it. It works on posts and pages, not WooCommerce products.

Related reading

• Automated meta descriptions for WordPress: drafting at scale with an approval step.
• How to change your WordPress SEO title: the other half of the snippet.
• What is a good click-through rate?: how to find the pages worth rewriting.

Your job is to write descriptions for the pages people already see in search, starting with the ones that get the fewest clicks for their position. Do it by hand with the steps above, or let RankHive find those pages each week and draft the descriptions for you to approve.