How To Choose The Best WordPress Theme For SEO

How To Choose The Best WordPress Theme For SEO

Your WordPress theme encapsulates your brand and helps provide a good user experience. But people often forget about the search engine optimization aspect of it.

A WordPress theme that isn’t SEO-friendly (or worse, is bloated and slow) can be a real hindrance in the fiercely competitive battle to land on top of the search engine result pages (SERPs).

And since higher rankings can drive more organic traffic, leads, and revenue — this is one element you really want to get right.

In this guide, you’ll learn what an SEO-friendly theme is, what you should consider when selecting one, and which five WordPress themes are best for SEO.

The Basics Of A Search-Friendly WordPress Theme

A WordPress theme built with search engine optimization in mind helps websites achieve better rankings on SERPs.

Optimized WordPress themes are built to elevate your SEO efforts and provide a great user experience.

There are thousands of themes for WordPress users to choose from and thousands more from third-party providers.

Most of these themes make your WordPress website look stunning, but a glance under the hood could tell a different story.

Poor coding, slow loading speeds, and a lack of plugin support can be hiding underneath a beautiful facade. All of these flaws affect search engine rankings.

When you have significant technical SEO issues, Google won’t trust your website as an industry authority, and you’ll likely struggle to reach the first page.

On the other hand, the best WordPress themes for SEO are both stunning and optimized with the latest SEO techniques in mind. They’ll have:

A responsive design.
Clean code.
Fast loading speeds.

And they’ll let you optimize your WordPress website effortlessly.

How To Choose The Best WordPress Theme For SEO

So, how do you choose an SEO-friendly WordPress theme?

You should:

1. Pick A Responsive Theme

Mobile devices (excluding tablets) account for nearly 60% of web page views worldwide.

A majority of smartphone users look up websites, products, and related content on their phones. After all, when you hear about a cool product, you usually don’t want to wait until you’re home to check it out.

SEO-friendly WordPress themes have responsive layouts. A responsive WordPress website will adjust to varying screen sizes across devices with ease.

That way, mobile shoppers aren’t greeted with a poorly adjusted ecommerce homepage when they click through.

Google prefers mobile-friendly websites and offers a tool where you can test how your website fares and performs on different devices.

Screenshot Google Lighthouse, November 2024

2. Pick A Theme That Supports Most Plugins

WordPress plugins help unlock your website’s true potential with additional features for both users and website owners.

WooCommerce, Jetpack, Akismet, and Google Analytics are popular plugins. You can also download the best SEO plugins to make optimization easier.

The WordPress theme you pick should support popular plugins, especially those you use regularly.

W3 Super Cache is an example of a plugin that’s always active because it maintains optimum page speed. You don’t want it to fail because you switched themes.

Screenshot of W3 Total Cache dashboard in WordPress CMS, November 2024

3. Pick A Theme With Clean Code

Your website is made up of code. If code is poorly written, it can affect your website’s security, speed, and resources.

The same applies to WordPress themes.

The best WordPress themes for SEO have clean code that makes them more secure and reliable, with less downtime.

Clean code and SEO go hand-in-hand. This is because clean code WordPress themes boost page load speed and SEO ranking.

For example, an optimized theme with clean code speeds up updates of essential SEO elements like meta, title, and header tags. This helps search engines to:

Find these tags quickly.
Crawl your website easily.

To analyze your chosen WordPress theme and ensure it has clean code that conforms to the standard WordPress coding conventions, you can make use of themecheck.info.

Upload a theme to the website using a zip file, and it will evaluate the theme for security and code quality.

Note that free WordPress themes don’t have the cleanest code and might pose security threats, especially if the developer copies and alters code from an online source.

4. Choose A Theme That Works On Multiple Browsers

Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Safari, and Opera are common desktop and mobile browsers, but there are several more. You don’t need to cater to all of them, but your theme should work across the most popular browsers.

An SEO-friendly WordPress theme caters to all popular browsers, making it convenient for users to read and share your content, regardless of their browser choice.

Besides supporting different browsers, check version compatibility. Not everyone uses the latest browser version. Often, updates are delayed based on the device or operating system they’re using.

Ideally, your website should work seamlessly on the last five versions of the most popular Windows, iOS, Android, and Linux browsers.

You can use tools like PowerMapper to check browser compatibility.

Screenshot of powermapper.com, November 2024
Developers can also manually run tests to determine compatibility.

5. Evaluate Page Builder Plugins Carefully

A page builder is a WordPress plugin that makes creating your website’s layout easier through drag-and-drop features. You can quickly choose from premade layout options and drag and drop the elements to place them where you want.

Page builders are an excellent option for easy website creation, and most premium WordPress themes offer them.

If you’re a digital marketing agency working with multiple clients, you can use page builders to set up multiple websites quickly.

But page builders do have a few issues.

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