How Changing WordPress Theme Affects SEO
The Relation between the WordPress Theme and Your Website’s SEO
With changing trends and fashion, it has become necessary to keep your website updated in order to attract an audience. WordPress provides you with hundreds of WordPress theme for your website as per your taste and requirement.
Apart from the trend, old themes have a high chance of getting hacked and might not have mobile site compatibility. Therefore, changing the theme time to time is healthy for your website.
The search engine optimization (SEO) received by a website depends on the WordPress theme you apply to it. This can be further understood as:
SEO Plugin:
Plugins can be used to enhance SEO on the existing themes, but the current or new themes are already designed to be SEO friendly. They perform most of your task related to SEO and leave hardly a few things for you to manually take care of.
Time Taken To Load WordPress Theme:
Time is a matter of concern for every website as the SEO depends mostly on the time taken to your website to load. Different themes have diverse loading time. Some might load the whole website at a go which might take some time to process, whereas some themes have a feature which allows the website to load in phases such as the content first, then the sidebars etc.
De-Indexing:
Not all themes have an inbuilt feature of indexing your pages. Therefore, when changing from one theme to another, check for any page being de-indexed by the new theme. De-indexing might cause an immense negative effect on your SEO.
Changes in URL With Changing WordPress Theme:
The URL might change from theme to theme. In case you change a theme, check whether it changed your URL or not as it might have created a new URL for the same website which can cause a change in your ranking.
Alteration of Permalinks:
Ensure while changing themes that your Permalinks remain unchanged. For being on a safer side, create a backup of the current theme before switching to new as it may cause changes to your added links and addresses.
Hence, seek professional assistance when required and opt for an efficient WordPress theme to enhance your SEO. Never forget to take a glance at the reviews of the people who have already used the theme.