Yoast SEO and LearnDash 5.1.8 Conflict

Resolved neilgee
(@neilgee)

1 week, 4 days ago

With LearnDash 5.1.8 and latest Yoast SEO the main content area on Courses, Lessons Topics etc in LearnDash are rendered blank with no underlying markup, no console or debug.log clues either.

Only by downgrading LearnDash or disabling Yoast fixes the issue.

Similar issue reported here.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)

Plugin Support Maybellyne
(@maybellyne)

1 week, 3 days ago

Hello @neilgee,

Thanks for reaching out. Often, we see problems occur in combination with another plugin or theme. The fastest way to rule out any conflict is to deactivate all non-Yoast plugins and switch to a standard theme like Twenty Twenty-Five.

Please test this on your development or staging site if you have one. If not, we recommend using the Health Check & Troubleshooting plugin. This plugin has a troubleshooting mode, which does not affect normal visitors to your site.

If you’re unfamiliar with checking for conflicts, we’d like to point you to a step-by-step guide that will walk you through the process: How to check for plugin conflicts

If you feel uncomfortable doing this yourself or if this does not solve your issue, our Yoast SEO Premium plugin comes with one year of (technical) support.

Thread Starter neilgee
(@neilgee)

1 week, 3 days ago

Thanks for the reply — I’ve actually already done that isolation work, so wanted to share the specifics rather than starting from scratch:

Setup: LearnDash LMS 5.1.8, Yoast SEO, WordPress 7.02, PHP 8.2.

Reproduction: With only LearnDash and Yoast SEO active (no theme customizations, no other plugins), LearnDash lesson/topic pages render the title but the entire content area below it (topics list, navigation, everything LearnDash normally outputs) is blank. No PHP errors or warnings in the browser console or in wp-content/debug.log with WP_DEBUG/WP_DEBUG_LOG on.

Isolated to a single Yoast feature: Going into Yoast SEO > Settings > Site features and turning off Open Graph data specifically — leaving every other Yoast feature (SEO analysis, readability, schema, breadcrumbs, sitemaps) on — resolves it completely. Turning Open Graph data back on reproduces the blank content immediately.

For context on why this only shows up now: LearnDash 5.x renders lesson/topic content through a newer template/model system rather than the classic the_content() filter chain, which is likely why this wasn’t an issue on earlier LearnDash versions.

Given it’s isolated to one specific feature toggle rather than a general plugin conflict, would it be possible to route this to your dev team directly.

Thread Starter neilgee
(@neilgee)

1 week, 2 days ago

Upon further investigation it is specifically the Open Graph module, if this is enabled in Yoast SEO the content in LearnDash 5 is blank if disabled it appears.
Plugin Support Angel
(@angeld33)

1 week ago
Since LearnDash updated its template/rendering system, it is likely that the change affected how content images are processed when Open Graph tags are generated. Because LearnDash is a commercial plugin and Yoast SEO’s Open Graph feature is free, our support team does not have a LearnDash license to test this directly. However, LearnDash support can easily install free Yoast SEO to test and debug against their updated rendering pipeline.

Before reaching out to them, here are a few recommended troubleshooting steps:
- Follow our guide to reset Yoast indexables using the Yoast Test Helper plugin, then re-run the SEO data optimization.
- If the optimization fails or gets stuck, it likely points to an underlying error during data processing that needs to be addressed.
- If the optimization completes successfully, the database structure is fine, and the conflict is likely tied directly to how LearnDash outputs images/content during Open Graph meta tag generation.
Try reproducing the issue on a fresh WordPress install with standard LearnDash sample/demo content (using tools like WP Playground, TasteWP, Local, or the Liquid Web LearnDash demo site).

What’s Next?
If it’s specific to your setup: If it works fine with standard demo content, the conflict may be unique to your specific site content or configuration.

If you can reproduce it on a clean install: Please feel free to open a public bug report outlining the exact steps to reproduce it. Otherwise, reporting the conflict to LearnDash support is the best path forward so their team can review how their new template system interacts with Open Graph image parsing.
- This reply was modified 1 week ago by Angel.

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