Getting started
Five minutes, and no licence. The audit is free and stays free.
1. Install and activate
Metaly needs WordPress 6.4 or newer and PHP 8.1 or newer. If your server runs an older PHP, the plugin deactivates itself and says so rather than leaving you with a broken site.
On activation it detects which SEO plugin you run. You do not configure this — it is read from what is active.
2. Choose which post types count
Do this before you look at the numbers. Under Metaly → Settings you choose which post types the audit covers. The default is everything public, and on a real site that is usually wrong in an obvious direction: one live shop had 352 product-attribute stubs against 80 pages of real content, so the headline gap described pages nobody intends to give a meta description to.
Leave out anything nobody searches for — attribute stubs, shop endpoints, internal record types.
3. Read the coverage screen
Metaly → Coverage reports how many published items have no meta description, how many have no SEO title, and how many images have no alt text. Every count is a link: click one and you get the actual list of pages behind it, so you can check the number rather than take it on trust.
What each number counts, and why a page that looks like it has a description can still be counted as missing one, is on Coverage.
4. Check the connection (recommended)
Under Settings → Check the SEO plugin connection, Metaly writes a probe value to one post, reads it back, fetches the rendered page over HTTP to confirm the change actually reaches the page, and then restores the original. It takes a few seconds and touches one post.
It is worth running once. Writing metadata that persists correctly and never appears on the page is the single most plausible failure of this kind of plugin, and this is the check that catches it.