Changing your website might be an inevitable step along the way. The reasons behind such major decisions are plenty. From rebranding, creating a better user experience, and changing a WordPress theme to completely redesigning your webshop to reduce bounce rate and improve website traffic, there are many reasons why a website owner can decide to do this.
However, these changes can at times have a domino effect. Ideally, this domino effect will bring about positive outcomes and results. But, the other outcome is possible as well. So, if you decide to make any major changes to your website, like changing your WordPress theme, you need to think about the effects it will have on your SEO.
Why do you even need a theme for your website?
In the simplest of terms, your website theme is like the skin of your website. It’s an essential element of your website. In more complicated terms, your WordPress theme covers the important elements like structure, layout, colour schemes and unique brand identity represented throughout the website.
If you want to attract visitors and keep them interested, your website theme has to encompass all the important elements of your brand and structural elements that contribute to a high user experience. In addition to that, if you want visitors to stumble upon your website, it has to be search engine friendly.
Thus, you need to make sure that it’s optimised and that your change of theme doesn’t negatively affect your rankings. But, will the change in WordPress affect your SEO? It definitely will, and here’s the breakdown.
Website speed
Every website change has the potential to affect your website SEO positively or negatively. Migrating your website to a new WordPress theme can result in positive or negative results. With this in mind, take into account that your website speed can be either slowed down or become faster with a new theme. Website speed can increase or decrease, so take this factor into account when choosing a new WordPress theme for your website. But, this can be avoided if you only focus on themes that do not take ages to load and that is recognised by users as fast and reliable.
Desktop and mobile friendly
The fact that your website can be easily loaded on a desktop and a mobile device is equally important in terms of SEO. So, if your chosen WordPress theme isn’t mobile-friendly, it can ruin your search engine optimisation efforts. Look into this carefully, so you won’t undo years of SEO efforts.
User experience
If you decide to change your current Worpress theme and change it with a different one, make sure to add value to your website, not the opposite. High user experience is the ultimate goal of every website. Your website exists in the online world because you have something to offer to your users. Having this in mind, always go for a user-friendly website theme instead of a flashy one that is hard to navigate. The goal is to attract new, retain old users and improve website traffic. The goal should never be to lose customers, conversions and website traffic. Theme with a poor UX can be the reason why your website ranks low in search engine results.
Website’s search option
Is your website easy to search or do people have trouble quickly accessing the desired page or content? This is yet another important factor that directly influences user experience and bounce rate. If your users have trouble searching your website because it isn’t functional, or because it lacks a search function, change this as soon as possible. Some themes do not have this option, but it can be easily upgraded. Google values user experience, so have this in mind when choosing a new WordPress theme that has search functionality.
SEO Metadata
Another thing you should pay attention to is how a new website theme changes your existing metadata. If your age titles and meta description are secretly changed, google crawlers might have trouble crawling your website and your website rankings will inevitably decrease. To avoid this from happening, team up with SEO Services Sydney or anywhere near you to ensure you maintain your rankings despite the changes to your website. A team of SEO experts by your side can help you navigate these changes without it affecting your SEO significantly.
Schema markup
Implementing a new website theme can affect your current schema markup. Even though this element is a tiny piece compared to other ranking factors, why risk losing the potential to rank better and higher than your competitors? This can be easily avoided by making sure your new theme is search engine friendly from the beginning.
Essential HTML elements
Essential HTML elements like headings and other elements of content formatting can be lost with a new WordPress theme or duplicated. The right formatting is important because it helps distribute content better and makes it readable, easily accessible and SEO friendly.
Images
Every theme is different so your current image setup can change easily. This means that your images won’t be optimised properly or you’ll see an entirely different version than the one you had previously. All of these issues are easily fixable, but you should know what requires your attention from the beginning so you’ll know how to implement things properly.
Loss of previous theme settings
If your previous theme was SEO-friendly, you won’t migrate the same settings to your new theme. In other words, you can’t expect your previous theme settings to be automatically copied with the new theme. To avoid this, make sure to test the functionality of the new theme before changing everything.
In conclusion
We can conclude that changing your WordPress theme has the potential of impacting your SEO. But, it doesn’t have to be a negative way if you pay attention to everything we’ve mentioned in this article. The impact can be positive if you pay attention to important search engine ranking factors and also have a team of SEO professionals by your side who will guide you in the right direction.