Questions, answered

Yes, if you run both. Two SEO plugins write two sets of meta tags into the same page head, which confuses search engines. Deactivate and delete the other one first. The same goes for caching, security, backup and SMTP plugins — MetaWrench covers those jobs too.

No. Every area is off until you turn it on. Want only the SEO and schema side? Leave Performance, Security, Email and Backup alone and nothing in them runs.

Bloat comes from code that loads whether you need it or not. Twelve separate plugins means twelve sets of stylesheets, scripts and database queries on every page load, and no way to stop them. MetaWrench loads only what you’ve enabled.

Almost certainly. Home services, automotive, medical, beauty, fitness, food and drink, retail, professional services, hospitality, education, pets, real estate, software, ecommerce, manufacturing, agriculture, transport, events, government and non-profits are all covered. Pick the closest match in setup and the fields, schema and recommendations adjust. Nothing fits exactly? There’s a general option.

WordPress 5.8 or newer and PHP 7.4 or newer. Any host. Multisite is supported.

Yes. Each site in the network that uses Pro counts as one site on your licence.

Yes. Cart, checkout and account pages are excluded from the page cache automatically, order emails go through SMTP, and product pages can carry Product schema.

No. Nothing runs on the front end until you turn it on, and each tool loads only what it needs. With everything off, a visitor cannot tell the plugin is installed.

Your pages, logs, backups and visitor data stay on your server; we never receive them. Our server only helps with signing in to Google and Bing and with page speed tests, and keeps no content. When you start an MW Doctor checkup from inside the plugin, it sends technical facts only (versions, your host, email and backup status, recent updates, the last error) — never your pages, customers or passwords — and they’re deleted after two hours. Self-hosting fonts removes a request to Google. Any tracking pixels you add are your responsibility, as they would be with any plugin. Our privacy policy has the detail.

Yes, and with the classic editor, Elementor, Divi and Beaver Builder.

No. MetaWrench makes its decisions from your setup answers and published SEO practice, not a language model. It does generate an llms.txt file, which is a file that helps AI crawlers understand your site — the same way robots.txt helps search engines. That’s the opposite direction.

Free covers everything needed to be found and to get your site back — indexing, schema, meta tags, redirects, connections, SMTP, basic security, and backup with restore. Pro adds the seven Performance tools, whole-site SEO scoring, live firewall rules and malware scanning, email logging and deliverability checks, site migration, and the Google Business Profile, Google Ads and one-click Tag Manager connections.

Yes, and it stays free. No trial period, no card, no feature that disappears after thirty days.

It depends on the plan. Pro covers 1 site, Pro Plus covers 3 sites and Agency covers 10 sites. Every plan has every Pro tool — the only difference is the number of sites.

Buy more than one licence, or email us and we’ll work something out.

Yes. Pro Plus and Agency are made for this: one licence, one key, used on your clients’ sites up to the plan’s limit. Or have each client buy their own. Support goes to whoever holds the licence.

Yes, as often as you like. On the old site go to MetaWrench → Account and choose Move licence to another site, then paste the same key on the new site. Your settings stay on the old site in case you go back.

Yes. Email support with the address you bought with and we’ll move your licence to the bigger plan. You keep the same key, so nothing needs reactivating.

The plugin keeps running and the free tier keeps working. Pro tools stop receiving updates and support ends. Your settings are kept, so renewing picks up where you left off. MetaWrench → Account shows your renewal date.

Full refund within 14 days of buying Pro, no reason needed. Email support with the address you bought with. See the refund policy.

The free tier is the trial, and it has no time limit. Pro has the 14-day refund instead of a countdown.

Yes, plans renew yearly: Pro is $99, Pro Plus $199 and Agency $399 a year. You get an email before each renewal with the amount, and you can cancel any time from MetaWrench → Account → Manage billing.

No. Annual only.

It can. The price you pay is fixed for the year you have paid for, and before each renewal you are emailed the price for the next one. No silent increases.

Pro keeps working until the end of the year you paid for, then the free tier continues. Nothing on your site is deleted and your settings are kept.

Yes. Pro Plus works out at about $66 a site and Agency at about $40 a site, against $99 for a single site.

No. The same prices for everyone, and the free tier is free for everyone.

Card and PayPal, through Freemius. They are the merchant of record, so they handle VAT and sales tax and you get a proper receipt.

Yes. Freemius emails a receipt when you buy. Invoices, your business name and VAT number are in your Freemius account — MetaWrench → Account → Manage billing takes you there.

Turn off MetaWrench’s page cache and keep the rest. Two page caches do not add up to a faster site. Images, minification, fonts and cleanup all still help.

Turn the setting off to confirm it was the cause, then add that page’s script or stylesheet to the exclusions under Performance → CSS / JS / HTML, and turn it back on. Page builders and sliders are the usual culprits.

Not visibly. WebP is 25–35% smaller at the same quality. The WebP file replaces the original JPG or PNG to save space, so keep your own copies of any photos you may need in their original form.

The tests run from different locations and simulate different devices. Compare MetaWrench runs to each other to see what a setting did; compare Google’s to Google’s.

It removes revisions, auto-drafts, trashed items, spam and expired transients — nothing live. It shows you the counts before you delete anything, and it keeps the most recent revisions of each post.

It manages the sitemap WordPress already generates rather than adding a competing one. Exclude post types and taxonomies, keep author archives out, point it at a custom address, and robots.txt stays in step automatically.

Yes, and that’s the point. A service page is often a Service and an FAQPage at once. Select both and each outputs its own JSON-LD block.

No focus keyword. Set one in the MetaWrench box under the editor and re-score.

Search Console isn’t connected, or Google has no impressions yet for that keyword. Connect it under Connections → Reporting and check again in a day.

No. It scores what you wrote and tells you what to fix. Writing it is still your job.

Yes. They live in the plugin, not the theme or .htaccess.

WordPress hands email to the server’s mail function by default, and most hosts throttle or block it without telling anyone. Turn on SMTP under Email, pick your provider, and send yourself a test. Then check the email log to see every message and whether it got out.

Gmail and Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Yahoo, iCloud, Zoho, Hostinger, GoDaddy, IONOS, Namecheap Private Email, Fastmail, Proton, Rackspace, OVHcloud, Brevo, SendGrid, Mailgun and Amazon SES, plus anything else with SMTP details under Custom. MetaWrench reads where your domain’s email is and fills in its settings for you, and checks your host isn’t blocking the connection before you save.

Gmail and Outlook need an app password, not your normal login password. Generate one in your Google or Microsoft account security settings.

Three DNS records that tell receiving mail servers your email is legitimate. Without them, mail lands in spam. Email → Deliverability checks yours and gives you the record to paste if one is missing.

No. It never runs inside wp-admin. Login protection can lock an IP after repeated failed logins, including yours — if that happens, wait out the lockout period or remove the entry from your host’s database tool.

Usually not. Some commercial plugins use encoded code that looks suspicious. If you installed it and trust it, mark it safe and it won’t come up again.

They work at different layers and don’t conflict. Cloudflare stops traffic before it reaches your server; MetaWrench stops it before it reaches your theme. Both is fine.

Because turning on protection you didn’t choose is how plugins lock people out. You turn on each one when you’re ready.

Your server, Dropbox, Google Drive, Amazon S3 or an FTP server — storage you own. We never receive them.

A rollback copy is taken before anything is overwritten. Restore → Rollback puts the site back as it was before you started.

Yes, on Pro. Take a full backup on the old site, install WordPress and MetaWrench on the new one, and upload the archive under Backup → Migrate. The site address is rewritten for you.

Yes. Those hosts lock wp-config.php, so MetaWrench renames tables instead of changing the prefix.

No. The database was replaced, so the session ended. Log in with the credentials from the old site.

Run MW Doctor. It checks your site in seconds and walks you through the fix — and it works even when you can’t log in. Inside WordPress, MetaWrench → Help lists everything that needs attention, with a fix for each, and its Start the guide button opens MW Doctor with what your site already knows.

A free checkup at metawrench.io/help. Type your site address and it looks at your site the way visitors and Google do: is it up, what error it shows, the security certificate, your email records, signs of a hack. Then it shows the fix in plain steps. Started from MetaWrench → Help, it also uses what the plugin knows, like a plugin that just crashed or an update that just happened. It only looks; it never changes your site.

WordPress runs scheduled jobs (backups, scans, reports) only when someone visits your site, unless your host runs them on a timer. On a quiet site, or when your host has switched WordPress’s timer off, they run late or not at all. Ask your host to add a cron job that loads your site’s wp-cron.php every 5 to 15 minutes; most hosting panels have a Cron Jobs page for it.

Some features download from api.metawrench.io: security-hole alerts, malware patterns, the questions for your type of site and the DNS help. If your host blocks outgoing connections, ask them to allow HTTPS to api.metawrench.io. Everything else in MetaWrench keeps working in the meantime.

Open it yourself. If it doesn’t load at all, it’s almost always the host: check their status page and contact them — MetaWrench → Help links both, and MW Doctor checks it for you even when you can’t log in. If it shows an error, a plugin or theme updated in the last day is the usual cause, and your host can tell you which from the error log.

The licence has expired or is in use on another site. Open MetaWrench → Account to renew it, or move it to this site. The free tier keeps working either way, and your settings are kept.

It switches off MetaWrench’s speed features on the front of your site — minifying, combining and delaying CSS and JavaScript — so you can tell whether one of them broke a page. Your settings stay as they were. Turn it on and off from the MetaWrench Dashboard.

Usually one of three things: the server ran out of space (MetaWrench skips a backup that won’t fit and emails you), scheduled tasks aren’t running, or a cloud destination lost its connection. MetaWrench → Help shows which, and Backup → Your host and backups shows the space.

They stay. Per-page data lives in post meta, settings live in the options table, and deleting the plugin leaves both alone so reinstalling picks up where you left off.

It goes back to how it was. Cache rules, generated files and scheduled jobs are all removed on deactivation, so a site with MetaWrench gone behaves as though it was never installed. Most plugins leave that debris behind.

Yes. A backup or a migration carries everything: business details, per-page SEO, redirects, schema, all of it. If the old site stays live with Pro as well, it counts as a second site on your licence.

Titles and descriptions are stored in post meta in the standard way, so most SEO plugins import them. Schema settings and redirects are MetaWrench’s own and would need to be recreated.