The answer to the question “does changing WordPress Themes Affect Your SEO Results” remains dynamic and is dependent entirely on the situations that it passes through. Changing WordPress website themes can affect the SEO results of your WordPress website as well as WordPress blog, whether it changes SEO positively or negatively depends on the process.
Most WordPress professionals are experts at doing magic with PHP and CSS, but when it comes to SEO, they probably fail
When handling a WordPress website, you need check whether the SEO of your website is handled by a plugin or a particular WordPress theme. There are various kinds of WordPress themes and plugins for SEO. It depends entirely on the SEO plugin if it helps or hinders your SEO.
While changing your WordPress theme, there are certain things that you need to keep in mind for your website. One important thing,is that you can not just expect it to provide great SEO results to your WordPress website, but you need to do some investigation of your new chosen theme.
As an example, WordPress Thesis theme has certain SEO features to handle the ranking of your website for search engine results. Also, with Thesis theme, you do not need to use SEO plugins as changing the theme on a frequent basis can again have some negative impacts on your WordPress website. The theme framework is preferable as it takes care of all minor changes and the little things about the SEO of your website.
While changing the WordPress theme, your website may come up with various issues. Read on to find out those changes in custom settings!
How Changing WordPress Themes Affect Your SEO Results
- Loss of Custom Theme Settings
When you switch your theme and you are unaware of the performance of your the new theme, you may end up losing all your custom theme settings. Your new theme may or may not contain the features from your old theme. The reason behind this may be the different ways of coding used in the themes, so you get different functionality and design.
You will find the difference in the order your website gets loaded. For instance, one of them will load the sidebars first and then post the body. Whereas, the other will load the body first and then will go for the sidebars.
While changing the theme of your website, if you have not checked the functioning of the theme, you may suffer such changes on your website which, in turn will result you with changes in the loading time of your website.
Why does this matter? If the loading time is increased, you will ultimately end up getting negative impacts on your SEO results. Make sure to check the performance before switching to your new theme!
- Changes in the Heading tags
When changing the WordPress theme, you must find out the heading tags for the post titles used in the theme you are selecting. The tags for which your post titles are used or hyperlinked will affect the overall SEO of your WordPress website. When changing the theme of your WordPress website, you should have studied this aspect of theme.
- Having a Backup is Always A Great Option
Whenever planning to change the theme, making a backup is a must for any WordPress Development Company. Make sure to you must take the backup of your website’s theme and database before migrating it to the SEO plugin. There are a lot of SEO plugins out there that contains inbuilt SEO settings to which you can store your backup and continue your process of changing the WordPress theme without any changes in your SEO settings.
When you have saved the backup of your theme, you can make use of the last theme if the working of the new theme does not go right. There are times when after changing the theme, you find that you do not like to work with the new theme. At this time, you can make use of the backup that has been saved from the last theme. This shouldn’t affect your SEO results, but you may notice some fluctuations in the SEO ranking of your website. After the initial fluctuations, it will return to your original SEO results. Hence, having a backup of the recent theme is a great option to have a perfect website working with the WordPress platform.
- SEO Friendly Theme Should be Preferred
WordPress platform contains a huge variety of beautiful themes, but when it comes to SEO friendly WordPress theme, very few of them seem to show positive results. Some of them come with fantastic design features, but lack in clean and SEO friendly coding. Hence, for making a perfectly SEO-friendly website, you should select the theme which has certain in-built features to enhance the SEO ranking of your website.
Once done with changing, make sure you have previewed the newest WordPress theme before it goes live on your website. With these, you can look for the bugs or errors in the latest version. There are certain tools available for detecting the error or the bugs happening to the updated website theme.
Change in theme affects your SEO results, but whether to bring those changes in a positive or a negative way is totally dependent on the selection of the WordPress theme. If chosen smartly, it will have drastic positive effects on your SEO, and if not, it can also ruin the recent ranking of your WordPress Website. All of it depends on the selection of your WordPress theme.
The functioning of the theme you select is the only thing that makes the difference in the working of your website and in the SEO results of the website. So, have a concrete checklist before rushing to look for the next WordPress theme for your website and follow it to get an exact and appropriate theme based on your requirements and budget.
Remember that selecting your WordPress theme smartly will lead you to better SEO rankings!
