Themes define the overall look and feel of your WordPress Website but Do your WordPress Theme Affect your website’s SEO?
In this article, you’ll get my honest opinion on whether WordPress Themes affect your site’s Search Engine Rankings or not.
I’ve been helping WordPress Websites rank on Google for a couple of years now, so my answer is as good as it gets.
Do WordPress Themes Affect SEO?
Yes, they do.
Your WordPress Theme can minimally impact your website’s SEO as Hope uses Page Experience to rank websites. Moreover, Core Web Vitals is an important part of Google’s Page Experience Ranking Signals.
Core Web Vitals relate to your Websites speed and load time as ascertained from real-world user data.
You can run an experiment yourself to determine if Core Web Vitals is a crucial ranking factor in your niche by searching for a couple of your seed keywords and then taking the number 1 pages and plugging it into Pagespeed Insights.
Pagespeed Insights will display whether the Page passes Core Web Vitals or not and if the majority of the pages you checked pass Core Web Vitals, you should consider getting a Premium, fast and responsive theme that does so too.
Themeforest is currently the best source of premium and fast WordPress Themes, The theme that I currently use on this site was purchased from Themeforest, and without ads, its Pagespeed score is 97/100 on average.
Here is a couple of Core Web Vitals Optimized Themes which I’ve personally used:
- Verta WordPress Theme (Best for Bloggers who want to use Gutenberg Block Editor).
- Puva Affiliate and Blogging Review Theme (Best For Publishers who want a fast-loading Affiliate Marketing Site).
- Foxiz Theme (Best Overall for Blogging).
Before Purchasing any of these themes, you should take their demo pages and check their loading speed in Pagespeed Insights.
Most times, after activating fast WordPress Themes on your site, the speed won’t be the same as the demo pages, what you wanna do is to refer to the theme’s documentation and check out the developer’s Recommended Speed Optimization setting, they help 95% of the time.
In my experience, I found out that ads also impact Core Web Vitals Metrics most especially the CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift) but premium ad networks have fixed this issue most especially Ezoic, so if you signup, your site can still pass Core Web Vitals though I can’t say the same for other Ad Networks.
