PlugPress
Meta Description Missing from Your Pages? How to Fix It
Short answer: update to Waggle 1.0.4. Older versions could remove another SEO plugin's
<meta name="description"> tag without printing one of their own. They also skipped the tag
on posts where you had not written a description by hand. Both are fixed, and the fix needs
no configuration.
There are three ways the tag goes missing. They look the same in your page source, so check
which one applies.
The tag vanishes when you activate Waggle next to another SEO plugin
Symptom. With Waggle off, your page source has a normal description tag. Turn Waggle on,
clear your cache, and it is gone. Confusingly, og:description and twitter:description
are still there and look correct.
Why it happens. Waggle writes titles and descriptions, the same as Yoast, Rank Math, All
in One SEO and SEOPress. Two plugins writing the same tag makes duplicates, so Waggle
silenced the other plugin. Before 1.0.4 it did that on every page, whether or not it had a
description to put in place of the one it removed.
The social tags survived because they have always fallen back to a trimmed excerpt. The
standard tag had no fallback. That difference is the whole bug.
So the og:description you are looking at is Waggle's, not your old plugin's. A quick
tell: Waggle's fallback is about 25 words and ends in an ellipsis.
How to check. Look at the whole head, not just the description:
curl -s https://example.com/your-page/ | grep -iE 'name="description"|og:description|All in One SEO|Yoast|Rank Math'
You want two things together: no <meta name="description"> line, and no marker comment
from your other SEO plugin. If both are true, this is your issue.
Fix. Update to Waggle 1.0.4. It now only takes the head over on pages where you have
given it a title or description. Everywhere else it stands back, so a tag cannot vanish.
You do not need to change any settings, and you do not need to remove your other plugin.
The tag is missing and Waggle is the only SEO plugin
Symptom. Most posts have og:description but no <meta name="description">. The pages
where you did type a description are fine.
Why. Same cause, other half. Before 1.0.4, the standard tag printed only where you had
entered a description by hand. Any post you never touched shipped without one.
curl -s https://example.com/some-untouched-post/ | grep -iE 'name="description"|og:description'
If og:description is there and name="description" is not, this is it.
Fix. Update to Waggle 1.0.4. The standard tag now uses the same fallback the social tags
have always used, so every page ships with a description.
A generated fallback is a floor, not a finish. Descriptions you write yourself read better
and always win. To fill them in at scale, use Content SEO → Post SEO, review the
drafts, and approve the ones you want. Waggle never writes AI text to your site without
your approval.
Two canonical or description tags on your home page
Symptom. Your home page or a category archive has two <link rel="canonical"> tags, and
often two description tags, when Waggle runs beside another SEO plugin. Single posts are
fine.
Why. The opposite problem. Waggle's takeover only ran on single posts and pages, but
Waggle writes a canonical and a description on the front page and archives too. There, both
plugins printed their own.
You only see the duplicate description if your site has a tagline under Settings →
General. With an empty tagline both plugins fall back to nothing, which is why this
appears on one site and not another.
curl -s https://example.com/ | grep -c 'rel="canonical"'
curl -s https://example.com/ | grep -c 'name="description"'
Anything above 1 is this issue.
Fix. Update to Waggle 1.0.4, which applies the same rule to archives and the front page.
Can I keep my current SEO plugin?
Yes. This is a supported setup, and after 1.0.4 it needs no configuration.
Waggle does two jobs, and only one overlaps with a traditional SEO plugin:
- On-page SEO — titles, descriptions, canonicals, social tags, schema, sitemaps. Yoast,
Rank Math, All in One SEO and SEOPress do this too. - AI visibility —
.mdpages,llms.txt, AI crawler tracking, the readiness audit, the
agent abilities. Nothing else on your site does this, and it never depends on which plugin
owns the head.
So you can keep your current plugin for on-page work and run Waggle for the AI side.
To move on-page SEO over, use Settings → Import, which reads Yoast, Rank Math, All in
One SEO and Slim SEO. Two things, in this order:
- Try it on a staging copy first. Importing writes to your posts.
- Import first, deactivate second. Preview, run it, check your titles on the front end,
and only then turn the old plugin off.