If you have an established website, you may have wondered whether changing your website theme will affect your SEO results.
While you may not feel like the theme you choose for your site may have a lot to do with search engine optimization, the short answer is that your website theme directly impacts your website’s SEO positioning.
When it comes to changing your website’s theme, it’s not just about going to your CMS dashboard and choosing a theme that looks pretty.
The theme you choose will influence your site speed, user experience, and a lot of other aspects that are closely related to SEO optimization.
Here are 6 ways changing your website theme will affect your SEO performance.
What Aspects Can Be Affected by Changing the Theme of a Website?
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The speed of the site
While you may simply judge website themes by how beautiful and elegant they seem to be, every theme has its own complexity. Your website theme can make or break how well your site performs.
Some may look pretty on the surface, but they may contain chunks of code that may simply not be necessary. Your website theme decides how many background scripts and assets must be loaded when a user visits your website.
Sure, you may think that a good-looking website more than makes up for the speed; Google may not even push your site to rank well if your site takes forever to load!
As a rule of thumb, when you look for a suitable theme for your site, choose one that is lightweight and loads swiftly. If your page loads within 2 seconds or less, it will add a nice boost to your SEO positioning.
Implementing a lightweight theme will help your site in the long run since, as you go on, you’ll simply keep adding more plugins, extensions, and customizations that will impact your site speed.
2. User experience
Does changing theme affect SEO user experience? Yes, drastically.
User experience is one of the most critical factors for SEO. Changing your theme without careful consideration makes it difficult for people to navigate your website and will stop people from browsing through it.
The bottom line is that they are likely to leave your site and simply move on to the following result on SERPs.
Google takes into consideration how long users stay on a particular page, also known as bounce rate.
A high bounce rate is a clear indication to Google that your website isn’t user-friendly and doesn’t provide people with what they’re looking for. This makes it nearly impossible for your website to rank high on Google.
When choosing a new theme for your website, you need to prioritize user experience. While a theme is a lot more than just design, your site design does have a lot to do with how your audience perceives your brand.
Is your new website theme readable? Is it well-designed? Are all the standard navigations in the right place? Does it work well on mobile devices?
Be sure to answer these questions when you choose your website theme.
3. Metadata
When you set up a site and install a theme, the theme may often have in-built SEO features. You may not be sure how this works, but the bottom line is that it’s an excellent thing.
This can help with metadata like your web page titles and meta descriptions which directly contribute to your website’s SEO — rich search snippets.
However, relying on your site theme to keep your metadata and structured data in place is not a good way to go.
When you choose to switch your website theme, you can unintentionally eliminate all this metadata.
The best solution to avoid this dilemma is to use a plugin to keep your metadata on track. SEO plugins like Yoast SEO and RankMath are excellent plugin options that you can explore for your website.
4. Structured data
Similar to metadata, changing your website theme can modify your site’s structured data setups.
This structured data, also known as Schema, is a sort of metadata that search engines like Googe utilize to better understand the contents of a page. Furthermore, search engines use this markup to display content from these web pages on the search results page.
Certain website themes allow you to enter structured data information by default.
Like metadata, if you happen to change your theme when you leverage your current theme to mark your website with the proper schema, you have a problem. You can lose all this data when you change your theme.
A schema may not be explicitly named by Google as a make-or-break ranking factor. However, just like many other aspects of SEO, having your Schema set up and up-to-date will boost your site’s SEO positioning.
5. URL Structure
While this doesn’t happen often, there is a possibility that changing your website theme can affect your URL structure. If you don’t consider this potential issue, you may be left with hundreds, if not thousands, of broken links and 404 errors.
It’s one of the most common issues when it comes to pre-built website themes.
To ensure that your URL structure isn’t affected when you test a new theme, check your permalink structure.
If you’re not familiar with 301 redirects, you may have to manually change your site’s URL structure.
6. Content Formatting
Does changing theme affect SEO content formatting? Yes.
Here’s the thing.
Testing out new themes may not affect the actual content on your site; however, it may change the formatting of this content.
The layout and the main structure of your website will probably remain the same, mainly because you will take particular care about these frontline elements before installing a new theme.
On the other hand, aspects like your categories, tags, featured images, and even your blog’s inner content structure can be affected by a website theme change.
The best way to avoid this content formatting error is to ensure that your content heading and subheading structure in your current theme is formatted correctly.
This means your main heading should be in H1, and the corresponding subheadings should be assigned the correct format, H2, H3, etc.
If you go with a premium website theme, there’s a significant probability that the content formatting from your previous theme will be preserved. Therefore, checking your current website theme before launching your new theme is usually a good idea.
Final Thoughts
At some point, you will end up changing your website’s theme. Therefore, it’s crucial to understand how changing your theme can affect your SEO ranking and the different SEO elements you need to keep an eye on.
In this blog, we’ve shared some of the most common ways changing your theme can impact your SEO and the best ways you can stay in Google’s good books after you make the switch.
If you’re looking for some help improving your site’s SEO positioning, feel free to book a no-strings-attached discovery call with Teranga today!
