TABLE OF CONTENT:
  1. Positive impact of changing themes on SEO
  2. Negative impact of changing themes on SEO
  3. How to the reduce negative impact of changing themes on SEO
  4. How to increase SEO rankings and performance by changing themes

Yes, changing the theme can affect your website’s performance. In fact, it can strongly influence your website’s performance and efficiency. 

Changing themes can have both positive and negative impacts on SEO performance. All vital elements of SEO, such as site speed, data, design, and content formatting, are affected by your themes.  A new theme can have a notable impact on SEO; comprehensive planning and execution are crucial to minimize risks and ensure an effortless transition. 

Positive impact of changing themes on SEO

  1. Enhanced website speed
  2. Enhanced mobile responsiveness
  3. Designing and enhanced user experience
  4. Enhanced data mapping

WordPress themes can have a positive affect on your site’s look. More positive impacts of a well-designed and high-quality theme are: 

1- Enhanced website speed

An optimized theme can reduce the page load time and boost your site and user experience. A well-coded theme with clean and efficient HTML can bring down time to load the site. Optimizing images and media files with built-in features that come in themes also impacts reducing their load times. Choosing an adaptive design for your theme can make it load on all devices efficiently, enhancing load speed. 

2- Enhanced mobile responsiveness

Modern and up-to-date themes may present improved mobile responsiveness, coordinating with Google’s mobile first indexing and boosting up your SEO activity. 

3- Designing and enhanced user experience

Time on site and bounce rate are affected by the design of the theme. A well designed theme improves usability, accessibility, and navigation, resulting in improved user engagement and higher rankings. 

4- Enhanced data mapping

Theme design significantly affects data markup execution. A good theme should be compatible with widely recognized SEO plugins such as YOAST SEO, Squirrly SEO, RankMath SEO that enable the addition of structured data. These plugins can automatically create and maintain structured data for a variety of contents, like articles and reviews. 

Negative impact of changing themes on SEO

  1. Site downtime and errors
  2. Compatibility issues
  3. Indexing issues
  4. Loss of customizations
  5. Complex theme and reduced user experience

1- Site downtime and errors

Poorly coded themes can interpose errors that could hinder your SEO. The process of changing themes can bring out temporary errors and site disruptions affecting search engine visibility, user experience, and SEO rankings. 

2- Compatibility issues

A new theme may clash with existing plugins and SEO tools,  creating challenges that could affect your SEO rankings and SEO performance. 

3- Indexing issues:

Changing in HTML structures and content organization may interfere with how your search engine indexes your site, creating problems in search visibility and dropping the rankings temporarily. 

4- Loss of customizations

SEO settings made in the old theme, such as meta tags, structured data, custom schema markup, and SEO enhancements, might not be transferred into the new theme, resulting in a temporary or permanent drop in SEO effectiveness. 

5- Complex theme and reduced user experience

If the user finds a new design complex and harder to navigate, it can lead to higher bounce rates and less engagement, impacting SEO. Choosing complex designs may also lead to increased load time for the site, interfering with SEO performance and rankings. 

How to the reduce negative impact of changing themes on SEO?

Changing themes affects your SEO rankings and user experience. There are many points that should be kept in view while changing themes and that could reduce the negative impact of changing themes, such as: 

1- Choose a theme that works effectively and doesn’t need a lot of plugins.

Less plugins results in quicker loading of the sites and improves user experience; therefore, a theme that is well-designed and well-optimized with fewer plugins  should be considered while choosing a new theme. 

2- Make site speed a prime concern.

Your site should not take more than 2 seconds to load, as it may increase bounce rates, impacting SEO enhancements negatively. 

3- Select a SEO-focused theme.

SEO-focused themes that can enhance the user experience and load the page faster are highly required for better site working. SEO-friendly themes such as Astra, Neve, and SEO-crawler may be beneficial.

4- Don’t change themes too frequently.

Changing themes too frequently can induce many negative impacts, such as site instability, disruption in site performance, and reduced user experience. Therefore, themes should not be changed too often. Changing themes can also induce errors on your site. 

5- Make sure you test your theme before going live.

To use your new theme, first establish a testing platform. This allows you to test your new theme’s performance before making it available to your users. By doing this, you can be sure that your theme is formatted correctly and offers a satisfying user experience. 

How to increase SEO rankings and performance by changing themes?

  1. Choose single-purpose themes
  2. Select a fast loading theme
  3. Put clean, structured code into practice
  4. Use built-in SEO features
  5. Maintain consistent URL structures
  6. Improve content visibility

There are some ways to ensure increased SEO performance, rankings, and site visibility without interfering with the user experience or site load speed. 

1- Choose single-purpose themes

Single-purpose themes can be used to avoid the increase in the load time of your sites. As compared to multi-purpose themes that can bloat your site, it is a very best option for specific use cases.

2- Select a fast loading theme

Select a theme with fast loading to enhance the user experience and increase search engine rankings. It can also reduce page load times. 

3- Put clean, structured code into practice

Choose a theme with well-structured code to help search engines index your site more efficiently. A well-coded theme also minimizes technical SEO issues. 

4- Use built-in SEO features

Choose themes with built-in SEO features and compatible plugins. This will help you in managing meta tags and enhancing SEO performance. 

5- Maintain consistent URL structures

Making sure that your new theme does not alter your existing URL structures helps to prevent broken links and maintain SEO rankings. 

6- Improve content visibility

Customize new themes to improve content visibility. Well-organized content can improve the user experience and reduce load time and bounce rates, improving SEO rankings.