I have a problem with saving meta descriptions

[DariaRadziuk]

• I've read and understood the contribution guidelines.
• I've searched for any related issues and avoided creating a duplicate issue.

Please give us a description of what happened.

I can not save meta description. I fill in the meta description for the page and save the page with the "update" button. When I repeatedly want to make changes to the page, I see an empty field with a meta description. Yoast says me: "your meta description is not filled". I attach screenshots that confirm this

Please describe what you expected to happen and why.

I do not understand what the problem is. I use the plugin for a long time, constantly updating to the newest version. and I recently discovered this problem when creating a new page. Now my search engine snippet doesn’t look so beautiful when I could fill out a meta description. I want the error to be resolved and use all functions completely

How can we reproduce this behavior?

Technical info

• WordPress version: 5.2.2
• Yoast SEO version: 11.7
  
  Webserver in use Apache MPM-Prefork 2.4.6-80.el7.centos.1
  PHP Version 7.3.4 (alt)
  MySQL Version - mysql-10.3.16

• If relevant, which editor is affected (or editors): -

• Which browser is affected (or browsers):
  -Chrome

• Relevant plugins in case of a bug: -

• Tested with theme:
  Twenty Nineteen

[Djennez]

So, if I understand this correctly, to reproduce:

1. Add text to the meta description
2. Update the page
3. Refresh the page
4. Changes to the meta description field are gone?

If these are the steps, I am not able to reproduce the issue. So I have some additional questions:

• Are these the right steps to reproduce? If not, please create a short list of steps.
• Does this happen on posts as well?
• Have you tried it with different content (short, long, with or without emoticons)?
• Have you done a Plugin/theme conflict check to rule out any other issues?
• You indicate that you've used our plugins for a long time, can you recall what changed between it working and it not working?

[DariaRadziuk]

Yes.

1. I fill in the meta description
2. I update the page
3. I want to edit the page later
4. meta description was gone

This problem is on pages and posts.
I checked all plugins for compatibility. all the same

After your answer, I tried to write a meta description without emoji. and meta description is preserved!
but I used to always emoji in the meta description and everything worked well. I would like to use them now, as it is very good for the user and search robots

[Djennez]

Allright, and how exactly do you add emoji's to this textfield in your case? I can use Ctrl + Cmd + Space on a mac, but doing it that way I am not able to reproduce the issue either.

[DariaRadziuk]

I use https://emojio.ru/
I copy emoji and insert into meta description

[Djennez]

Very strange, I tried those as well and could not reproduce the issue. One other thing I can think of is if you use another editor (it shouldn't matter, but I can't think of anything else). The screenshot seems to show that as well. What editor are you using?

[DariaRadziuk]

I'm sorry. but I didn't understand your question. what does the editor mean?
is it a plugin or theme? Or is it the appearance of the admin panel?

[Djennez]

The editor is the software that is used to create / edit your posts. Normally you would use Gutenburg (block editor) or the classic editor.

[DariaRadziuk]

I use plugin KingComposer Page Builder

[Djennez]

Hmmm ok, that doesn't seem to matter.

In a previous post I asked:

You indicate that you've used our plugins for a long time, can you recall what changed between it working and it not working?

That was the one question that was unanswered. And it's the last thing I can think of to check.

[DariaRadziuk]

nothing serious. I always update the plugins to the new version. so is yoast

[DariaRadziuk]

what should I do?

[Djennez]

The only thing I can think of is the database character encoding and collation. If those don't support emoji encoding it might look like the data is saved but it actually isn't. To check this you could save a meta description with emoji's and check the database immediately afterwards. Are the emoji's encoded / saved in there? If not, there might be some errors somewhere in he server logs and you can check which encodings are used by the database.

You might have to investigate this with a developer / your hosting party.

[DariaRadziuk]

OK. I will try to solve it. Thank you!

[alana314]

We are seeing this issue too. No matter what we make the snippet in the yoast settings on a page, we see this comment box and no description or og:description:

This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v11.7 - https://yoast.com/wordpress/plugins/seo/

  | Admin only notice: this page does not show a meta description because it does not have one, either write it for this page specifically or go into the [SEO - Search Appearance] menu and set up a template.

We are using the sage theme.

[Djennez]

@DariaRadziuk this post might have a solution that you can try. It does seem to be related to the database encoding like I mentioned in my last message.

[Djennez]

I believe that the database encoding was the culprit of this issue and it should be checked if you're experiencing the same issues. I'll be closing this thread due to inactivity but if someone has this issue and was able to solve it by changing the database encoding I would like to hear of that as confirmation.