WordPress (self-hosted)

• Admin access to your WordPress dashboard.
• A user with the Author, Editor or Administrator role — it needs the publish_posts and upload_files capabilities. Contributor and Subscriber roles cannot publish or upload images, and Test Connection will tell you so.
• Your site served over HTTPS — Application Passwords are disabled on non-secure sites.
• WordPress 5.6 or newer (Application Passwords are built in since 5.6).
• The WordPress REST API reachable (it is on by default; some security plugins block it).

An Application Password is a secure, revocable key that lets Rankealo publish and update posts without your main account password.

1. 1
   Log in to your WordPress admin dashboard.
2. 2
   Go to Users → Profile.
3. 3
   Scroll down to the Application Passwords section.
4. 4
   Enter a name (for example, Rankealo SEO) and click Add New Application Password.
5. 5
   Copy the generated password immediately — WordPress only shows it once.

Reference: WordPress Application Passwords guide.

In Rankealo, open Integrations, choose WordPress (Self-Hosted), and fill in these fields:

Click Test Connection. Rankealo verifies the credentials against your site's REST API — you must see a successful test before Save Integration becomes available. Once saved, the integration is ready for publishing.

When Rankealo publishes to WordPress, each article carries:

• TitleThe post title.
• ContentFull article body as HTML.
• Meta descriptionUsed as the post excerpt.
• SlugA stable slug derived from the title, set when the post is first created.
• Featured imageUploaded to your media library (with alt text) and set as the featured image.
• SEO title, description and focus keywordSent to Yoast SEO, Rank Math and AIOSEO fields — see "SEO plugin fields" below.

Tags and categories are not synced; assign them in WordPress after publishing.

WordPress only accepts SEO plugin fields over the REST API when the plugin exposes them. After each publish or update Rankealo reads the post back; if the fields were not saved, the article is marked as partially published with the warning “SEO meta not saved”. The post itself is live.

• Yoast SEO: Yoast does not register its meta keys for REST. Add a small snippet (for example in a code-snippets plugin) that calls register_post_meta with show_in_rest => true for _yoast_wpseo_title, _yoast_wpseo_metadesc and _yoast_wpseo_focuskw on post (and page if you publish pages).
• Rank Math: Rank Math exposes its fields through its own REST endpoint (/wp-json/rankmath/v1/updateMeta) rather than meta, so the read-back may warn even on a working setup. Set the Rank Math fields inside WordPress if you need them.
• AIOSEO: register _aioseo_title and _aioseo_description for REST the same way as Yoast, or edit them in the AIOSEO panel.

Rankealo tracks the WordPress post it created for each article. When an article is edited — or automatically re-optimized by Improvements — Rankealo updates the same post in place rather than creating a duplicate. You keep one canonical URL and its history.

Deleting an article in Rankealo permanently deletes the WordPress post (it bypasses the WordPress trash). If the post was already removed in WordPress, the delete is treated as done.