How Changing WordPress Theme Affects SEO
How do you feel when you stumble upon an attractive website? Don’t you get tempted to come back to your website and change its theme? With the availability of content management systems (CMSs) like WordPress that offers a plethora of themes to choose from, you can fulfil that temptation easily. There are hundreds of free and paid themes oozing with creativity that will definitely suit your taste as well as your website’s requirements.
However, you often drop the idea because of all the complexities related to it.
Even if your site has good rankings and is doing better in terms of SEO, you still need to consider the importance of theme-change. Older themes are prone to hacking and might not be compatible with mobiles. There are also themes that do not work effectively and add spammy links to the sites. Switching to new themes solves such issues.
Well-built themes give out favorable results. Getting professional help for an SEO-optimized cheap web design service with a whole new facelift can fetch best results
How changing your WordPress theme affects your website’s SEO?
Many reported changes in their page ranking immediately after adopting a new WordPress theme. Let’s see how a theme can make or break the SEO of a page.
Handling Site’s SEO – WordPress Theme or SEO Plugins
With an existing theme you could use plugins to take care of SEO, but are you aware of the fact that current themes come already designed to be SEO friendly and are capable of taking care of your site’s SEO to some extent? Some tweaks still needs to be done manually, but they take care of most of the job.
Page Loading Time
Uptime – time taken by your webpage to load – matters a lot for SEO. Some themes are designed such that they load the contents first, and then sidebars and widgets. Other load the whole page in one go. Loading the whole page at once might take longer than loading it in phases. Some themes come built with the latter option. Your target should be themes that load webpage in phases.
De-indexing of Pages
While changing from one theme to another, some themes add no-index to the pages. In such cases, your pages might not show in the search results, affecting SEO adversely.
Coding and HTML
Themes have their own codes and when you change your themes, your page coding changes. Sometimes you might also find that a new URL is created for the same site. These changes affect the way your HTML is read by search engine spiders and alter your ranking.
Changes in Permalinks
While shifting to a new theme, some permalinks get disabled and this is not a good sign for your site. It is crucial to ensure your permalinks stay unchanged and lead to the same pages and posts.
Backup your current settings always so that you could revert to original theme in case things go south. Always check reviews and feedbacks of a theme and run a quick quality-check before adopting.
Same theme might not work well forever. Getting professional help is always better than putting the site’s credential at stake, and a cheap web design that refreshes the look your site while enhancing SEO is always a win-win.
Source: https://www.designwall.com/blog/changing-wordpress-theme-affects-seo/
