Will a Theme Change affect SEO?

Developer help
1

Does a complete theme change affect the SEO, beyond the initial wow factor for the audience which is expecting one thing but gets another?

2

Hey @kairos. Which theme are you switching to and from? Switching themes shouldn’t affect SEO

3

Hey. I am not switching yet, just trying to assure for later. Currently Casper.

I thought so as well, but I’d rather make sure.

1 Like
4

Each theme will have it’s own pros and cons

1 Like
5

I don’t think that it should change SEO

6

Yes, theme change has an effect on SEO but it’s hard to quantify directly. Like I’d never say “I’m going to change to this theme to rank in #1”. Maybe to rank higher, or less low.

The things that would affect your SEO that you’d get from changing themes would be

  • Layout — pay attention to what content is “above the fold” (see here)
  • Speed — speed is an important ranking factor. Slower web page = lower rank. Google says so, user experience says so, etc. (see here)
  • Design (visual/experiential) — whether the design is appealing or not is going to impact your dwell time, bounce rate, and pages per session, which will impact SEO. Ugly theme or hard-to-parse design → bounce. (see here)
  • Links — some themes (like default casper) are better at internal linking, showing “you might also enjoy…” posts at the bottom. Not all of them do this.
  • Page html — a theme in ghost might use h3 tags instead of h2, or some other thing that makes the content harder to parse by a spider.

Maybe have missed something, but at least the above.

7

To be honest I am not sure if I understood you correctly with the theme but I think I know what you mean. So, when you use a backlink, you need to be sure that the topic of the thread is going to perfectly fit your link. Otherwise, the the bot created by Google, which is called crawler, can can observe the mistake in the system and can delete your comment. Also, if you post too many links on the same day, your website can get sanctioned by Google.You can read more on blazemedia.co.uk, they have a lot of information, I always use it.

8

Yes changing theme impact your SEO.
There are lots of factors around when it comes to changing theme such site speed,user experience, contnet structure and CTA Etc and it woudl be potentialy the positive impact