How Does VeloCMS Handle My WordPress SEO Data?
Yoast and Rank Math SEO fields transfer automatically during import, and 301 redirects preserve your Google rankings when URLs change.
Your WordPress SEO data transfers automatically during migration. VeloCMS reads Yoast SEO and Rank Math meta fields from the WXR export and maps them directly to the corresponding fields in the VeloCMS SEO panel — you don't have to re-enter anything.
Which Yoast fields actually come over?
The meta title (_yoast_wpseo_title), meta description (_yoast_wpseo_metadesc), focus keyword (_yoast_wpseo_focuskw), canonical URL (_yoast_wpseo_canonical), and the noindex flag (_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-noindex) all transfer. Open Graph image and Twitter Card fields transfer too if you had Yoast Social set up. The Rank Math equivalents (rank_math_title, rank_math_description, rank_math_focus_keyword) are mapped identically.
What about my Google ranking — will I lose it?
Your rankings are tied to URLs, not the platform. As long as your post slugs stay the same (which they do by default in the VeloCMS migration — slugs are preserved exactly), Google's indexed pages still match. The real risk is if you change your URL structure during migration. If WordPress used /category/year/slug/ and VeloCMS uses /slug/, that's a URL change and without redirects you'd see ranking drops.
Always verify your slug list before and after migration. The importer shows a before/after comparison — if any slugs changed, add 301 redirects for them in Tools → Redirects before you point your domain at VeloCMS.
How do 301 redirects work in VeloCMS?
Go to Admin → Tools → Redirects. Add a redirect with the old path (from WordPress) in the From field and the new VeloCMS URL in the To field. Set the type to 301 Permanent. VeloCMS serves these redirects at the edge via Cloudflare — they fire before the Next.js app even loads, which means they're fast and don't burn server resources. Add all your redirects before cutting over DNS so there's never a window where old URLs return 404.
Does VeloCMS generate a new sitemap automatically?
Yes. VeloCMS generates a sitemap.xml at yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml automatically — no plugin, no manual updates. Every published post and page appears in the sitemap within seconds of publishing. After migrating from WordPress, submit the new sitemap URL in Google Search Console to help Googlebot discover your content quickly. There's no need to request removal of the old WordPress sitemap — it'll naturally stop being served once you move DNS.