Does Changing WordPress Theme Affect Traffic & SEO?
If you are the blogger person, who are using free WordPress themes, then you are changing your website theme around a lot.
These are 2 most commonly asked questions by the bloggers who are changing their themes a lot.
- Will changing theme affect my blog’s traffic?
- Will changing theme affect my blog’s SEO?
The answer of these questions changes with many different scenarios, and I am going to answer these questions in this article from all angles with regards to traffic, WordPress, and SEO.
But before going ahead, there are few important things that I want to mention:
· If you are using an SEO WordPress plugin to manage your blog’s SEO, then there will retain your overall SEO, but only if your new WordPress theme is SEO optimized.
· Many WordPress themes comes with built-in SEO optimization like Thesis and Genesis, and if you are using your theme’s SEO feature, then chances are very high that your blog’s SEO will be definitely affected by changing your theme.
Who is Managing Your Website’s SEO? WordPress Plugin or Theme?
There are different scenarios, if you are using SEO optimized theme and you are not the person who changes theme every next day, then you don’t need to use any WordPress SEO plugin. Just leave your SEO on your WordPress theme. And if you change your theme every time, then it’s good idea to leave your blog’s SEO on a WordPress plugin.
If you want to use WordPress SEO plugin for handling your blog’s SEO, then it is highly recommended to use free WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast plugin, which is one of the best free SEO plugin. It will allow you to handle your blog’s complete on-page and on-site SEO.
Changing WordPress theme cause these issues:
Changing in Heading tags
Think you change your WordPress theme, and you were using H2 tags for your post titles, or post titles are hyperlinked, this will definitely affect your blog’s overall search Engine Ranking. Every blogger who is in this field, must heard that Thesis and Genesis are two best top SEO optimized WordPress themes. Their clean codes, proper Heading tags and other care of small SEO requirements make them 2 of the best themes.
When you are shifting your blog’s from one good theme to another good theme, then you don’t have to worry. But, when you are going on a brand new theme, then you have to worry because this theme is not SEO optimized better than your old one.
I have seen with many WordPress theme developers, and their work is amazing when it comes to CSS and PHP, but when it comes to blog’s SEO, the developer has no clue that how to achieve proper SEO.
That is why I always working within the WordPress theme framework, because they care all little things.
Losing your custom theme settings:
Whenever you change your theme, it might affect your old custom settings, like sidebars, footers etc.
When you change your old WordPress theme for a new one, you might lose those specific-theme feature. Either your new theme has all these features, you have to hire a WordPress developer for customization.
Moreover, all the themes are coded in different ways.
For example:
- Some themes load the post data part first then the sidebar area.
- Some other themes load everything at once that will increase the loading time.
If you know that the loading time of your website impacts your ranking in search engines, you can clearly determine if your ranking will be worst or better based on how much slower and faster your website is loading.
Change WordPress Theme by keeping same ranking in search engines
Import all SEO setting into a plugin:
Whenever you want to change your theme, you should always make a backup of your website’s theme and database.
Then, migrate your all SEO data to a plugin.
One of the best SEO plugin (WordPress SEO by Yoast) has this feature internally, and by using this feature, you can import your all SEO data to Yoast SEO plugin, after this step, you can change your blog’s theme to any other theme without any affect to SEO.
Pick a theme which is SEO Friendly:
There are many beautiful WordPress themes out there.
While they all look amazing with their beautiful designs, many of them doesn’t have basic SEO features. So you have to choose SEO friendly theme which has clean code.
Once you have changed your WordPress theme, you can use any bug finder tool like SEO spider or Semrush which can crawl your blog and detect errors. If you detect any bugs in your theme code, then it’s a time to make changes in your theme or change your theme again to better one.
It’s a reality that when you change your blog’s theme, it will affect your blog’s crawling.
So doing a little change in your traffic and ranking is usually obvious in most cases, through you can always fix all of your SEO issues with a proper site SEO audit.
I always recommend you to use and stick with one theme for a long time, as changing your theme all the time will definitely affect your blog’s overall branding. Moreover, most of time you are not be able to detect all SEO changes immediately which happened due to the change, so it will take some time to see the difference.
Also, when you decided to change your theme and you are buying a new theme for your blog, make sure your new theme is validated by the W3C markup service.
I always recommend you to use a custom design for your website, I always pick a theme framework and hire a theme designer to code a custom design theme for me. This not only gives me a feeling of uniqueness on my website, but also make my website a brand. Once you have selected a custom design for your website, you don’t need to worry about changing your blog’s theme at semi-regular intervals.
You’ll be happy with custom design.
Also read:
Tell me if you have noticed any difference of your blog’s ranking in search engines after changing your WordPress theme.
Diyyan Mehboob, Professional blogger in Pakistan. Started blog to complete my passion about blogging, Helping readers all around the world to solve problems about Wordpress, SEO and Online Earnings.
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