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Does A Website Theme Matter For SEO?

 Does changing the theme of a website affect the ranking or SEO? If it does, to what degree? What are the best practices while changing the theme or design?

Before we dive into it, we will take a step back. 

First of all, the theme can determine so many things.

  • How Content is displayed in the form of images, videos, etc.
  • Internal links
  • Page load time
  • Content Options
  • Structured data use

If you ask me that does a theme matters for SEO, the answer is "YES". A theme can make search engines understand the content you create. It determines many SEO factors. In short, changing a website theme also will generally affect SEO. Picking a theme for a website is hard even when it comes to visual design. 

Recommended practices to change a website theme

  • Try themes out on a test website.
  • Add some content from your previous website.
  • Now you can compare.
  • If you're just testing make sure to block indexing of the test website so that it does not waste the crawl budget of search engines. 
  • Make sure you check out the SEO starter guide.
  • See HTML generated by theme.
  • Try the search console testing tool.

As you can see a theme can determine so many things on a website it's a good idea to pick a wonder that works for you. You can use it for the long run. So, before changing a theme, keep your eyes on this. 

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