With the Yoast SEO plugin, is it possible to make the meta description a required form field?

An alternate way to avoid empty meta description field is to set a default meta description using meta template variables in the dashboard.

This article in the Yoast knowledge base explains how to do this and lists the available variables:

Here’s what I ended up doing:

  • Login as admin.
  • In dashboard: SEO >Titles and Metas > Post Types

  • In the Meta description template field for Posts and Pages, I entered the following value and pressed Save Changes button:

    %%sitename%% : %%title%% (%%date%%)

Here’s the tag it produced:

<meta property="og:description" content="My Blog : A New Post Awakens (August 16, 2017)" />

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