This is for people that use Elementor, the Hello Elementor theme, and a 3rd party SEO plugin in their WordPress sites, such as Yoast, Rankmath, The SEO Framework (the one I use), quite probably others. Let’s face it, there are probably few people that DON’T use a 3rd party SEO tool, if they’re doing anything with SEO at all.
In a nutshell, the Hello Elementor theme adds Meta Description tags by default, and my third party theme (in this case, The SEO Framework) would also write descriptions. This could be detrimental for SEO or at least for the user experience, as briefly described in this Sitebulb post:
The meta description is considered important to help users quickly understand what content they can expect to find on the page, when clicking through from the search engine results page. Well written meta descriptions typically achieve a better click-through-rate.
If there are multiple meta descriptions on the page, it may lead to search engines displaying the ‘wrong’ one, which in turn may lead to lower engagement or CTR from search results.
Thankfully you can easily turn it off via the theme Settings.
I found this because I recently started using the Hello Elementor theme (with a child theme, of course). I have long been an advocate for Elementor as a webpage builder, despite its numerous reported failings which I won’t get into here. Essentially I chose it as an easier way for my customers, once I have handed a website back to them, to be able to edit content and also be able to add “fancy” elements without needing to contact me, or learn multiple back-end tools.
Historically I wrote blogs using the native editor, but more recently I wrote a few using Elementor. It wasn’t until I then used Screaming Frog on my site to check some SEO related issues that I saw ALL of the blogs written with Elementor had duplicate Meta Descriptions. That seemed, in a word, weird.
A quick Google search and I had an answer from a now archived Reddit post, that detailed the same issue and found that the Hello Elementor theme would automatically inject Meta Descriptions into posts. Thankfully there is a method to turn it off, which on a subsequent SEO scan resolved the issue!
When logged into the back-end, go to Hello > Settings. The very first page shows Advanced Settings and a toggle to turn off the description meta tag.
So it’s as easy as that! It would be useful if either the theme or the SEO product would detect and alert if the other was present, but for now it seems just one of those things I need to remember for new sites where I continue to use the Hello Elementor theme.
If this post has helped you I would love to hear from you via the comments, and please share this post far and wide to those that might also find it useful.
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