Yoast - Disappeared fields

Problem

In September 2022, the Yoast fields on a clone of webshop (called de_de), have disappeared. E.g., they are not present for

• Home page
• Checkout page - eventhough the name is the same as for the source site
• Product Attribute taxons
• Diagram 100 page - eventhough the name is the same as for the source site
• Privacy page
• Buttonbar page Merk.

In these cases:

• Yoast section are missing from the main pane
• Additional Yoast settings are missing under Publish
• No Yoast checkbox under Screen settings.

However, Yoast fields are present for

• Products
• Product Categories taxonomies.

Possible causes

• Several database tables, probably including wp_options have been updated through SQL. Maybe some fields with serialised data have been compromised
• Names of Attribute Taxonomies have been updated. Through wp option get wpseo, it still shows the old names. Maybe I updated these taxonomies in a way that their names are not synchronised within Yoast.

Additional information & actions

• This site is a clone of nl_nl. In this source site, the Yoast fields work. In another clone, called nl_en, Yoast fields are also still working
• In nl_en, the names of Attribute taxonomies have been synchronised
• I would prefer to not delete all Yoast fields: It would be quite some work to recreate those
• All Yoast settings (wp_admin » Yoast SEO) are identical for nl_nl', nl_en and de_de
• Disabling & enabling Yoast (wp plugin deactivate wp-seo & wp plugin activate wp-seo), didn't make a difference
• Recreating the Yoast index (wp yoast index) didn't make a difference
• Disabling & enabling all options at wp_admin » Yoast SEO » Features - No difference
• Disabled & deleted Yoast + reinstalled throush WP-CLI and enabled through wp-admin + first-time setup wizard: The old settings were still present - No difference: Uninstalling Yoast doesn't remove settings. To do so, you need to remove stuff from table wp_options [1] - Quite easy to do through WP-CLI or SQL
• There are no relevant settings under Screen options (e.g., on the home page)
• Inspector (Google Chrome » Right mouse » Inspector): No results
• Removing transients (wp transient delete --all): No difference
• Fixing possibly corrupt serialised data: No difference.

Fields are still available in the database

The Yoast fields are still available in the database and they don't contain serialised fields.

For the home page (ID=7):

nl_en: Yoast fields in table wp_postmeta

de_de: Yoast fields in table wp_postmeta

Solution

Most settings are stored in three fields in table wp_optionc. Appearantly, these got corrupted:

• Deactivate Yoast
• Remove these fields (I renamed them to ..._tmp
• Reactivate Yoast + start wizard

...Problem solved.

Lastly: I don't know how this happened, especially since I did clean up potentially corrupted serialised fields.

Remove three fields with Yoast serialised configuration data: wpseo, wpseo_titles and wpseo_taxonomy_meta

Remaining problem: Settings for Attribute Taxonomies

• Settings for Attribute Taxonomies are not back!
• Field wpseo_taxonomy_meta seems to be gone.

See also

• Yoast - Database model