License for temporary URL

Hello,

Thank you for contacting Rank Math and bringing your concern to our attention.

If the temporary development site is live then you will need both Free and PRO versions installed on your site to have all functionalities of Rank Math.

Please go through this video tutorial that shows you how to get started with your PRO license: https://www.youtube.com/embed/nCDe67K_3rA

It’s always better to discourage search engines from indexing the development site from the WordPress Dashboard > Settings > Reading > Search Engine Visibility

This is also possible from the global meta options. Please navigate to WordPress Dashboard > Rank Math > Title & Meta > Global Meta > Robots Meta and set this to noindex.

Apart from this, Rank Math can be used freely on those kinds of websites and a lot of people do that to make the SEO changes they would like and then transfer over to the live website when everything is as they want.

When you will transfer your website to the main domain make sure you have done the reverse of the above steps so that all your SEO-related data is pushed to Google.

After transferring the site to the main domain, you have to install Rank Math and Rank Math PRO and connect the website with your Rank Math PRO account.

And for SEO data transferring, the best way would be to use the technique, to export from the old domain and import it to the new one. You will find the option by going WordPress Menu > Rank Math > Status & Tools > Import & Export. By this, you will have the same General Settings, Titles & Metas, Sitemap Settings, Role Manager Settings, Redirections.

After that, just enable the Rank Math’s 404 Monitor and if you see any broken link, you can create a 301 Redirection using the Redirections module to the right post.

Here is an article on how to use Rank Math Import & Export Feature:
https://rankmath.com/kb/import-export-settings/

Hope this helps you. Please do not hesitate to let us know if you need our assistance with anything else.

Thank you.