While translating my website's pages, I noticed that since a couple of updates ago, I have duplicate entries for Rank Math's custom fields as you can see in the attached image.
I haven't changed any of WPML's settings and, I have gone trough all your documentation but, I can't find any way to resolve this issue.
Please advise if it's a bug or it has to do with the settings and, what can be done to resolve this.
Please try the following steps after creating a full backup of the database and website:
1. Make sure that Rank Math is updated to the latest version.
2. Go to WPML > Support > Troubleshooting page, then click the following:
- Clear the Cache in WPML
- Remove ghost entries from the translation tables
- Fix element_type collation
- Fix WPML table collation
- Set language information
- Fix post type assignment for translations
3. Edit the page in the default language and update it after making a small change, then update the translation.
I did everything you indicated and, as you can see from the attached screen shot, the problem remains.
Unless this is due to my migrating from Polylang over to WPML back in Late May and some ghost data still being in the DB somewhere, it makes 0 sense as I did not have that problem with any of my pages nor posts until 2 WPML updates or so ago.
If you need access to my site, please let me know and I'll email you a temporary login.
To enable it, open your wp-config.php file and look for:
define('WP_DEBUG', false);
And change it to:
define('WP_DEBUG', true);
// Enable Debug logging to the /wp-content/debug.log file
define('WP_DEBUG_LOG', true);
// Disable display of errors and warnings which is recommended on a live site.
define('WP_DEBUG_DISPLAY', false);
@ini_set('display_errors',0);
Then try to reproduce the issue and check if any errors were saved to the debug.log log file inside the /wp-content/ directory
If you can paste your debug.log to https://pastebin.com/ and provide me that link, it would be great!
2. I would need to request temporary access (WP-Admin and FTP) so I can investigate this issue further.
– preferably to a test site where the problem has been replicated if possible –
Your next answer will be private, which means only you and I have access to it.
❌ Please backup your database and website before providing us with access details ❌
✙ I would additionally need your permission to de-activate and re-activate Plugins and the Theme and to change configurations on the site if needed. This is also a reason the backup is critical.
✙ I would also need your permission to take a local copy of your site to debug the issue without affecting your live site.
If you don't see the form below, please don't add your credentials as they will be publicly exposed: hidden link
Our 2nd tier supporters checked and found that the meta field values are duplicated in the database, please see here: hidden link
We don't think that this is related to WPML. If you have a backup before updating WPML, you can check in DB with this query and let us know the results:
SELECT *
FROM `MnVhK_postmeta`
WHERE `post_id` = '35902' AND `meta_key` = 'rank_math_description'
LIMIT 50
We also suggest contacting Rank Math support and checking if they know about this issue or have any similar reports.
Interesting, I have no idea what could have caused this.
The only backup I have prior to migrating to WPML has Polylang entries in it. Needless to say restoring it isn't an option.
Although I very seldom work with PHPAdmin, I'll see what I can do.
Since every page and post has that duplicate entry problem, using your screenshot and query as a baseline for all, kindly indicate which one of the double entry should be deleted (or it doesn't matter).
I've contacted Rank Math and further to accessing my website, here's what thewy said
We’ve checked your post and indeed duplicate meta description was appearing there. After troubleshooting, we found that the other meta description was added by your Hello Elementor theme.
However, we’ve added the following filter on your theme’s functions.php, and now the other meta description has been removed.
I've updated all my posts and pages and yet, when I go into translation, as you can see from the image, I still have duplicate entries when it comes to the meta description and keywords.
I've cleared the WPML cache, removed ghost entries, ran both Fix element_type collation and Fix WPML table collation as well as Set Language information and Fix post type assignment for translation. No changes.
What else could be the problem here? I need these to go away.
Please advise and thank-you in advance for your assistance.
Cheers,
Marc
P.S.: doing a restore prior to this problem showing up would mean hours of work being lost so, needless to say that it isn't an option.
FYI, I inspected the source code of a few of my site's pages and posts and the meta description only shows up once. HOWEVER, in WPML translations, it, focus keywords and snippets appear are still all duplicated no matter what I do.
I tested the function provided in your reply on the local site copy and I can see the same, the meta tag was removed from the source code but the duplicated entries still exist in the database.
According to Elementor's docs, the code snippet you added to the theme only prevents the theme from displaying the meta tag with the page description.
It's not removing the database entries so it's expected that the translation editor will keep showing duplicated fields. Kindly check their docs here: hidden link
I tested removing one of the entries then the issue was resolved as you can see here: hidden link
I suggest contacting Rank Math support again to check if they have a workaround to remove the duplicated entries in bulk. Otherwise, you'll have to delete it manually in each post.
Kind regards,
Mohamed
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