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How to fix “Yoast SEO had problems creating the database tables..”

Yoast SEO problem creating database table

I had started getting strange error after installing the latest Yoast SEO plugin version (v14.1) on WordPress v5.4.1

Yoast SEO had problems creating the database tables needed to speed up your site.

Please read this help article to find out how to resolve this problem. Your site will continue to work normally, but won’t take full advantage of Yoast SEO.

Show debug information

The link in the message is totally not helpful. It just offers to contact your hosting company or change hosting.

Hi,

For Yoast SEO to work, Yoast SEO needs to be able to create new tables in our database. Yoast SEO automatically tries to create these tables but failed to do so. Could you fix the database permissions so it can in fact create those tables?

Yoast SEO requires the following permissions: ALTER, CREATE, DELETE, INDEX, INSERT, SELECT, UPDATE and DROP.

Yoast suggested I’d contact you on this page. If you have questions for them, feel free to reach out to them through the email address listed here.

Thank you!

https://yoast.com/help/cannot-create-database-tables/

Right. I am really in rush to change my hosting company because one plugin has a bug and it doesn’t work.

If you press “Show debug information” it reveals SQL statement which is causing an error

AddColumnsToIndexables – Error executing ‘query’ with: ALTER TABLE wp_yoast_indexable ADD blog_id bigint(20) DEFAULT 1 NOT NULL Reason: Duplicate column name ‘blog_id’

You need just to install another Yoast plugin to fix this problem. I don’t understand why they don’t point to this plugin in their help page.

Here are the steps you need take to fix it:

1. Install Yoast Test Help plugin

2. Go to Tools -> Yoast Test

Yoast Test plugin menu
3. Find Yoast SEO section and press “Reset indexables tables & migrations” button
Yoast Test plugin Reset indexables tables
4. And then go to SEO -> Tools and click “Start processing and speed up your site now”
Yoast SEO Tools Start processing and speed up your site

Hopefully you will get such message

Yoast successful indexing

and all your problems will be solved.


Please comment bellow if this solution was helpful and tell us which WP version you are using.

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