HowTo and FAQ Schema in WordPress After the 2026 Deprecation

If you're searching for how to add HowTo schema in WordPress, there's something you need to know before you install anything: HowTo rich results no longer exist. Google deprecated them in August 2023. FAQ rich results followed on 7 May 2026.

What makes this worth an article rather than a footnote is that the WordPress plugin ecosystem has not caught up. We tested seven schema plugins on a clean WordPress 7.0.2 install in July 2026, over two months after the FAQ deprecation, and five of them still ship editor blocks that generate the dead markup, with no warning anywhere in the interface or the source.

Here's the current state of play, what it means for pages you've already built, and what to do instead. For the types that do still earn rich results, see our guide to adding schema markup in WordPress.

The Timeline, Precisely

Google's position on existing markup is that FAQ structured data "can stay in place" without causing problems, but it "won't produce visible results in Google Search."

That's the key nuance most coverage gets wrong. This is not a penalty. Nothing breaks. The markup simply stopped doing the one thing it was there for.

What WordPress Plugins Are Still Doing About It

We checked every plugin in our tested comparison of WordPress schema plugins for FAQ and HowTo block support, as of 30 July 2026:

Yoast SEO 28.1, released on 21 July 2026, ten weeks after the FAQ deprecation, still ships blocks/structured-data-blocks/faq/ and blocks/structured-data-blocks/how-to/, backed by src/generators/schema/faq.php and src/generators/schema/howto.php. There is no deprecation notice in the block definitions or the generators.

We built a test post using both blocks. Here's what Yoast put in the page:

{
  "@type": ["WebPage", "FAQPage"],
  "@id": "https://example.com/faq-howto-test/",
  "mainEntity": [
    { "@id": "https://example.com/faq-howto-test/#faq-question-1" },
    { "@id": "https://example.com/faq-howto-test/#faq-question-2" }
  ]
}

{
  "@type": "HowTo",
  "@id": "https://example.com/faq-howto-test/#howto-1",
  "name": "FAQ and HowTo block test",
  "description": "A short how-to.",
  "totalTime": "P0DT0H10M",
  "step": [
    {
      "@type": "HowToStep",
      "url": "https://example.com/faq-howto-test/#how-to-step-1",
      "name": "Open the editor",
      "itemListElement": [
        { "@type": "HowToDirection", "text": "Go to the post." }
      ]
    }
  ]
}

Complete, well-formed, correctly linked FAQPage, Question, Answer, HowTo, HowToStep and HowToDirection markup, for two search features that no longer exist. The page went from 16 typed nodes to 20 and from 4,029 to 4,266 bytes of JSON-LD, all of it inert.

So Should You Strip It Out?

Mostly no. Here's the decision, case by case.

Leave it: FAQ markup on pages with real, visible FAQ content

Google explicitly says it can stay. It costs you a small amount of page weight and nothing else. There are also two reasons to keep it that have nothing to do with rich results:

• Schema.org is not Google. Other consumers read structured data: Bing, assistants, and increasingly the retrieval layers behind AI answers. A Question and acceptedAnswer pair is a clean, unambiguous statement of "this is a question and this is its answer," and that's useful to anything parsing your page, whether or not Google draws a widget.
• Removal costs editorial time and buys you nothing measurable.

Strip it: FAQ markup that doesn't match visible content

If you have pages where FAQPage markup was added purely to chase the rich result, meaning questions that exist in the JSON-LD but not on the page, or a token FAQ block bolted onto a product page, remove it. That markup was always a policy risk, and now it doesn't even have an upside. This is genuinely the most common case on sites that were aggressive about FAQ schema in 2021 and 2022.

Strip it: HowTo markup, in most cases

HowTo has been dead for nearly three years. Unlike FAQ, it's also structurally intrusive: Yoast's How-to block wraps your content in specific markup and CSS classes, which constrains how you can lay out a tutorial. If the block is shaping your content rather than describing it, convert those sections to ordinary headings and lists.

Always strip it: markup for content that isn't on the page

Unchanged and not negotiable. Structured data must describe visible page content. That rule survived the deprecation intact.

What to Use Instead

The instinct after a deprecation is to find the replacement type. There isn't one, and chasing a substitute is the wrong response.

For how-to and tutorial content, use Article (or BlogPosting) properly: a real headline, datePublished, dateModified that reflects actual edits, a resolved author with a Person node and sameAs links, and a publisher. On the tutorial pages we've audited, a correctly populated Article node consistently does more than a HowTo node ever did, because Article rich results still exist and HowTo's never will again.

For FAQ content, structure it well in HTML: a clear question as a heading, a direct answer immediately below in the first sentence. That format is what gets pulled into featured snippets and AI answers, and it never depended on the markup. The schema was always a hint, not the mechanism.

Add BreadcrumbList if you haven't. It's one of the few types that still reliably changes what appears in the SERP, and most WordPress sites either lack it or have two competing copies from conflicting plugins. WooCommerce stores are the textbook case: three of the major SEO plugins add a second breadcrumb trail alongside Woo's own, as covered in the WooCommerce schema markup guide.

A note on Speakable

speakable comes up often in WordPress schema searches, and it's worth being clear: SpeakableSpecification is limited to news publishers. Google's implementation is tied to Google News and news content in voice results, and it is not a general-purpose enhancement for a business site or a blog. Adding it to a services page does nothing. If you're not a news publisher, skip it.

How to Remove FAQ or HowTo Markup in WordPress

If it came from a Yoast or Rank Math block

Delete the block and rebuild the content as ordinary headings and paragraphs. Converting the block rather than deleting it usually leaves the wrapper markup behind, so it's cleaner to rewrite the section.

If you want to suppress FAQ output site-wide without touching content

For Yoast, remove the FAQ piece from the graph:

add_filter( 'wpseo_schema_graph_pieces', function ( $pieces ) {
	return array_filter( $pieces, function ( $piece ) {
		return ! ( $piece instanceof Yoast\WP\SEO\Generators\Schema\FAQ )
		    && ! ( $piece instanceof Yoast\WP\SEO\Generators\Schema\HowTo );
	} );
}, 11 );

For Rank Math:

add_filter( 'rank_math/json_ld', function ( $data ) {
	foreach ( $data as $key => $node ) {
		if ( isset( $node['@type'] ) && in_array( $node['@type'], array( 'FAQPage', 'HowTo' ), true ) ) {
			unset( $data[ $key ] );
		}
	}
	return $data;
}, 99 );

Both belong in a child theme's functions.php or a code snippet plugin, the same approach we cover in adding schema markup without a plugin. Validate before and after; on a large site, check a sample of URLs rather than assuming.

If you don't know where it's coming from

That's the common case on a site with several plugins and a few years of history.

The Wider Lesson

FAQ schema was, for about four years, the single most over-deployed structured data type in WordPress. It was easy, it was a block, and it produced a visible SERP win. Then the win was restricted, then it was removed, and a great deal of the work invested in it evaporated.

The types that survived every one of those changes, meaning Article, Product, BreadcrumbList, Organization and LocalBusiness, have something in common: they describe what a thing is, not how you'd like it displayed. Markup that describes your entity accurately keeps its value when a display format is retired. Markup deployed to trigger a specific widget is only ever as durable as the widget.

That's the filter worth applying to the next type you're tempted to add at scale.

Plugin behaviour verified 30 July 2026 on WordPress 7.0.2 / PHP 8.4.21 with the plugin versions listed. Deprecation dates from Google's published guidance and contemporaneous industry reporting.

About the Author

Shakur Abdirahman

Technical SEO Specialist

Shakur is a Technical SEO Specialist with expertise in structured data implementation, large-scale website migrations, and redirect management. He tests schema output against real WordPress installs and helps businesses preserve search rankings and maintain crawl efficiency during complex site changes.

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