Website themes can affect SEO to some extent

Google has recently published a short video. It has answered if website themes can affect SEO or not. The video host John Mueller said yes. A website theme will affect a site’s SEO. He has also noted how this can happen.

Mueller said it is easy to consider website themes just as a bunch of colors on top of a finished structure. But it involves many other things. A theme will impact how a website displays many other elements which are the core of SEO. It can affect Text, headings, images, interlinking of a page, page loading time, and structured data.

As Google says, good themes make it easier for the search engines to have a proper understanding of the content. Mueller further affirmed that the change of a website theme would affect the SEO of a website.

Mueller suggests it is a good idea to test website themes before you choose one. He has recommended trying themes on a test website. It is better to add content from the previous website. He further recommended blocking indexing for a text website so that Google does not crawl it accidentally. He further added, it is better to Review the HTML that you generate from a theme.

Adam J Humphrey, a search marketing expert of Makin 8 Inc, has shared his insights. The Way a website impacts, in a similar way it resolves for search engines. He has seen a 26% increase in the view of a large boat group. Themes matter in such cases.

Chris Labbate, the Director of Marketing at SEOBank.ca, also agreed on the fact that the choice of theme is very crucial. If you make a poor choice of theme, then it can affect your SEO. Moreover, it can affect your site speed significantly.

Alex Alexakis, the founder of PixelChefs Web Design & SEO, also agreed to the fact. The requirement of multiple plugin functions, loading of excess external resources, poor coding, unoptimized CSS, etc., leads to an impact on SEO.

Though many theme advertisers present themselves as SEO-friendly ones, that is not always the case. Many themes offer low-performance scores in Google’s PageSpeed insights tool. Thus John Mueller suggested setting up a test site to stage your new WordPress theme where you can perform the further configurations.