6 Ways WordPress Themes Can Influence Your SEO

WordPress is known for its amazing SEO capabilities. Interestingly, the first thing most people do after installing is change the default theme. People often pick a flashy, feature-rich and smart looking theme. While it is a great idea to do so, the code that we add into WordPress may not be the best for SEO.

Let us take a look at why we should be using an SEO ready theme instead of a flashy one.

Heavy

A badly coded theme with a lot of javascript and other elements to make it flashy can have a serious impact on your WordPress website. A code heavy website is never a good candidate for SEO. It will have a serious impact on the website performance and can undermine the SEO friendly elements that WordPress have by default.

Themes like Astra boast of being less than 50KB in size.

Page load speed

A lean website is always an SEO boon. When your website has many overheads, it will have an impact on page load speed. People are busy and have no time to waste. They will simply move to the next possible option.

Page load speed can also affect the mobile readiness of your website, which can again impact the SEO score of your website.

Bounce Rate

What is Bounce Rate?

Bounce rate is the measure of visitors leaving the website after visiting a single page. Ie, they come and go without actually using the website. This mostly happens when your website is not something that your visitor likes to be on.

What if the Bounce Rate is high?

A high bounce rate can have a serious impact on the website’s SEO. Google would not like a website where people come and go without actually using it. It gives an impression that the website is not useful to the visitors landing on that page.

A bad theme can contribute to a higher bounce rate of your website. Make sure you are using an SEO ready theme that helps users feel at home when they land on a web page.

URL structure and format

Ensure that the URL structure and format are SEO friendly in your theme. Some themes invest heavily in the look and feel but forget the SEO friendly elements. As a result, you will end up having a bad URL and code structure which is not helpful with SEO.

UI and UX

To minimise issues like high bounce rate, a developer should also work a lot of the good looks and ease of use elements in a theme. Most of the theme builders have an in-house UI/UX team who works on this.

It is their job to ensure that people actually are able to use the website without any hindrance. The aim is to keep them on the website as much as possible. The higher the time visitors spend on your website, the better you rank on Google.

Meta data

Do you know that search engine bots see the website as a piece of code instead of what is presented to an user. Proper use of meta data is still relevant in SEO.Post titles, tags, structured data and more have greater influence than you imagine.

Ensure that your theme is doing well in this area. Even if you are building a custom theme, it is important to ensure that all the SEO elements are taken into consideration.