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Does changing a WordPress theme affect SEO?
Yes, changing a WordPress theme does affect your SEO. How much changing a theme affects your SEO and whether or not that affect is positive or negative is the real question. But how?
Changing a WordPress theme, its design, content formatting, how it displays images and structured data all affect your site’s speed and thus, your SEO. Some changes to your WordPress theme may actually affect your SEO positively or negatively to such a degree that you may notice a significant drop in traffic. This is because your theme’s design, site speed, content formatting, and structured data are all vital SEO factors in where your website shows up on the Search Engine results page.
In this post, I’m going to go over how changing a WordPress theme affects SEO as well as what you should look for in a WordPress theme that is optimized for SEO. I will also answer related questions regarding WordPress themes and SEO in general.
How does changing a WordPress website’s theme affect SEO?
Every theme out there is coded differently.
When you change a theme, the structure of that theme will be different from your previous theme, as a result, search engines will see it differently as well.
A new theme in itself will not make any difference to your rankings, all else being equal. However, a new theme may present your website’s data in a different way.
Changing themes alone shouldn’t really impact rankings though, especially if you are changing themes for better performance, faster page load speeds, more streamlined coding etc., then these changes could actually have a positive affect on your SEO.
However, if you are changing themes for more “bells and whistles’ ‘ i.e. more interactive features, higher pixelated imagery, complicated design features, heavier media presence etc. then this could in fact, have a negative affect on your SEO. All of these I will go into more below.
The only way to tell of course is to monitor your WordPress website’s performance closely for dramatic increases or declines after any theme change.
Here are the main factors that may determine how changing your WordPress theme will affect your SEO:
Front-end mark up.
Your WordPress theme is the front-end of your website. It’s the part search engines see and will use to make sense of your content.
Therefore, you need to make sure that the Title, Meta Descriptions, Headings, Categories, Internal links, Schema, Site Maps etc. shouldn’t change too much.
The look-and-feel of your website will change of course with the new theme, but the actual content and structure shouldn’t change or at least not too much.
HTML.
Especially if your HTML displays itself in a different order, even though your content may appear to be the exact same way on the page.
You see, content to the human eye is all the same. Though web crawlers will see something different. If the site’s HTML is extremely different, Google might have to re-index the entire site.
Google Algorithm Updates.
Sometimes a Google algorithm update occurred at the same time you changed your theme, so in that case It could also just be a coincidence.
You will have to check your data and see when your search rankings dropped.
URL Structure.
When you’re changing the theme, be very conscious of changes to the rules that govern the URL structure. Things like trailing slashes. Are they always forced? Which is ideal. Are their paths different?
Has the permalink structure changed? For example, has it gone from “post name” to “numeric” i.e. 123, etc. These would have a major impact since your posts will lose all that age and accompanying links and link juice.
If there are any changes to the URLs, create 301 redirects for the pages on the current site that redirect to the corresponding pages in the new site.
Internal Links.
Does your new theme respect the internal linking structure of your old theme? If not, you’ll have a bunch of broken links within your posts which link out to other relevant posts in your blog.
Hidden Links.
Some WordPress themes come with hidden links that can confuse Google’s Algorithm, which could also contribute along with these other factors, to a total re-indexing of your website.
Plugins.
Many times you will need to add plugins to compensate for features that your new theme may be lacking or delete plugins whose functions your new now performs without.
In fact, sometimes you may leave plugins on your website that your new theme doesn’t need since they’ve built those functions into it. If this is the case, you will have redundancies in your new theme and added bloat, which will inevitably slow down your site.
Since page loading speed is a recognized SEO factor, this would of course affect your SEO.
Bloated coding.
As I’ve mentioned above, all themes are different. And this is no truer than the way that WordPress themes are coded.
Although all WordPress themes are coded with PHP, some WordPress themes have much more code than others. This could present a problem. Themes that are overly coded carry too much, what’s called, “bloat”.
Let’s not forget, whenever a user accesses your WordPress website through their browser, that browser has to read all the code that website contains in order to render and show it to you through your browser and onto your screen.
Themes that are overly coded will load slower than themes that are not. It’s as simple as that.
So, if this is the case, then why don’t all themes come with as minimal amount of code as possible?
A few reasons actually.
First, many older WordPress themes had generally tended to be more heavily coded.
Secondly, some themes are made by independent WordPress developers.
Although many, if not most, independent WordPress developers are excellent at what they do and are cognizant of the amount of code that they put into their themes, some independent WordPress team developers aren’t as cognizant and tend to overcode or write sloppy code, which can bloat a WordPress website.
Part of writing code efficiently means being very well organized. Some developers just aren’t and it reflects in the coding of their themes.
A third factor is that many themes, especially themes you find on popular WordPress theme marketplaces, is that they want to be all things to all people.
As a result, they try to include as many features, options designs etc. as possible into their themes. This way they can sell their themes to as many people as possible.
They can advertise all their features and convince people that more is better or that they are getting good value for the money.
Although this may have some truth in it, in all honesty, it actually has the opposite effect in saddling down WordPress users with overly complicated and bloated themes containing features that they will probably never use.
This is why it’s important to choose a theme that has just enough features and aesthetic appeal to make the website as pleasing to the eye and as functional as possible for a better user experience, but without the bloat.
There is a fine line that many developers need to balance when creating themes between aesthetics, functionality and efficiency.
One popular expression enthusiasts use when talking about WordPress is that, “Code is poetry“.
Does updating a WordPress theme affect SEO?
There’s a difference between changing a WordPress theme and updating the same WordPress theme.
If you are simply updating your current WordPress theme, then there should be little affect to SEO.
In fact, many theme updates actually benefit SEO. Theme updates many times will streamline the themes coding, making it perform better with less code.
Other updates plug in potential security vulnerabilities in the theme. Whereas other updates may add a few extra features or update the overall appearance of the theme itself.
Usually a great theme and WordPress Developer will make these necessary changes without adding any additional bloat or even eliminating any access coding if possible. This is where paid, premium themes really shine.
You see, what free themes you’re not always guaranteed to receive the latest theme updates from the Developer.
However, with paid themes, you are basically guaranteed to have the most recent updates of that theme, especially by reputable WordPress Theme Developers.
Are all WordPress Themes SEO friendly?
Most, if not many, modern WordPress themes nowadays come SEO friendly.
You can even make a theme more SEO friendly by adding one or two SEO and other optimization plugins.
Although I should mention again that you should be extra careful if you’re choosing a WordPress theme from one of the giant theme marketplaces.
One of the reasons why I chose GeneratePress is that theme’s developer, Tom Usborne himself, is quite involved and active with the theme and its users.
You will find Tom on GeneratePress support forums answering questions and giving advice to GeneratePress users.
This is not as common as you may think.
What are the most SEO friendly WordPress themes?
You should always stick to the major WordPress themes with excellent reputations.
It doesn’t take long to do a Google Search to find which themes have the best reviews. And they don’t have to offer the best affiliate commissions to be highly recommended by those writing the reviews.
In fact, many times it’s quite the contrary.
It’s usually the worst performing WordPress themes (as a consensus) that usually offer the highest paying affiliate commissions, but not always. So keep that in mind.
With the above being said, in my opinion the most SEO friendly themes are: GeneratePress, Astra and OceanWP.
These themes are great looking, well functioning, all without the bloat because they are also very efficiently coded. This makes them not only fast, but provide an excellent user experience.
Does changing a WordPress theme affect SEO? Conclusions.
It’s almost guaranteed that changing a WordPress theme does affect SEO one way or the other.
The important thing here is taking the time to understand what you’re getting into when changing your theme. Then know how to get back to your old theme should things go south.
At a minimum, you’ll want to ensure all URLs and their permalink structures remain unchanged, and most on-page, i.e. the Title, Content and its Formatting like H1’s, H2’s, etc. Meta Tags and Descriptions, Anchor Texts, Headings, Categories, Internal links, Schema, SiteMaps factors and content remain as unchanged as possible as well.
Then you need to understand exactly how the new theme differs from the old theme and how each of those differences will impact your SEO.
If you are really concerned about your SEO when changing themes, then first build up the new theme with your current content in a test environment.
Then double check that from an SEO point of view. Run some page speed tests, check indexing, etc.
If there aren’t too many changes, then go ahead and launch.
