Where your changes live
Every WordPress fix is a value in your site's database, never a file. That single fact decides what is safe to deploy.
Before deploying anything, it helps to know exactly what RankGrep touched. The answer is short: the database, never the files.
What RankGrep writes
| Fix | Where it is stored in WordPress |
|---|---|
| SEO title | Post meta (rankgrep_seo_title), or the page title if the connector is not installed |
| Meta description | Post meta (rankgrep_meta_description), or your SEO plugin's field |
| H1 heading | Post meta (rankgrep_h1), or the page content if the heading is typed into the editor |
| Opening paragraph | Post meta (rankgrep_intro), or the page content |
| Image alt text | The media library item |
| Broken internal link | The page content |
| robots.txt lines for AI search bots | The rankgrep_ai_visibility option; WordPress adds them to the robots.txt it serves |
| Business structured data | The same option, printed on the home page |
All of it lives in the wp_posts, wp_postmeta and wp_options tables. You can see and edit every value in the RankGrep SEO panel on the page editor once the connector is installed.
What RankGrep never writes
- Theme files (templates,
functions.php, CSS, images) - Plugin files
wp-config.phpor anything else under the site root- Uploads
The one file-level piece of work is wiring a theme so it prints the heading fields. That is done once, by hand, and deployed like any other theme change.
What that means for deploying
Files can go up freely. Uploading a theme zip, pushing code from Local to WP Engine, deploying through Git or SFTP: none of these touch the tables above, so every RankGrep fix survives.
The database must not go up. Pushing a local database over the live one, restoring a backup, or promoting a staging copy replaces those tables wholesale. Every RankGrep fix goes with them.
The rule that follows is one sentence: files go up, the database comes down. The next two articles apply it to the two common workflows:
- Deploying without losing changes for Local and WP Engine
- Uploading a theme zip for any host
And if it has already happened: If changes were overwritten.