Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Does changing template for a wordpress site affect SEO
-
Hi I work for an Inventory Management Software company and we already have a WordPress site but I am currently working on re-designing of our WordPress site and in this process, we are looking for moving to a new template.
I want to know what will be the impact on SEO performance while taking a shift to a new template.
-
Yes there can be big impacts, as template changes may result in any of the following changes:
- Design and UX
- Site Architecture
- Internal Linking
- Page Speed
- Other possible inconsistencies between themes, depending on your WordPress setup in general (title tags, structured data, etc)
In general, to mitigate against these, I would do the following:
- Design and UX - at minimum take a 'gut check' and be sure the new theme is a design and UX improvement - ie: is content still above the fold? Are there any weird scrolling issues (I see this sometimes with themes that try to be too fancy), are the menus still easy to navigate?
- Architecture - make sure the new theme doesn't break anything like your URL structure, or pagination links to archive pages etc.
- Internal linking - aim to keep your menus (main nav, drop downs, footer, sidebars) exactly the same at least for now - if your footer nav has links to important pages for example and those links go away, this might hurt the performance of those pages.
- Page Speed - as Donald astutely noted, make sure the new theme is at least the same in page speed, or better an improvement. You can use a few tools like WebPageTest or GTMetrix to test.
- Other - also as noted, try to get your SEO settings situated correctly before making the switch, and use the Yoast plugin. Then when you switch your theme, be sure the Yoast plugin settings are still primary and your new theme has not overridden anything.
Hope that helps!
-Dan
-
I second that, I've a site based on a multi-purpose theme. Now years down the line with my understanding of SEO I'm aware of the problems but to change it now with hundreds of pages designed with a visual builder I'm stuck with it. Swapping to a lighter theme is a major undertaking.
-
If you mean themes, then I would say yes.
I changed a theme on my blog recently and it resulted in major organic impressions growth. I'm pretty sure it's the theme because I didn't change anything else.
-
WordPress does not use templates it uses themes. These themes can be customized as necessary including best SEO practices for your brand.
There can be many issues for your SEO when switching themes, however they may not be realized until you adventure into the theme. For instance custom post types that might be available in one theme may not be available in another affecting possible urls causing 404 errors or any number of issues.
If you use Yoast for WordPress SEO plugin you can customize your SEO titles and descriptions. This should stay current between themes. A rule of thumb, stay away from themes that have a lot of bloat. Many themes found on theme forest are designed to cover a multitude of businesses and niches causing bloat. Bloat causes site slow down and can hamper SEO rankings. Choose a theme that is light and does not have as many bells and whistles. If you need these things you can always ad on later with plugins.
Thanks,
Don Silvernail
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Will critical error in wordpress for memory limit affect seo rankings?
will critical error in wordpress to increase memory limit affect seo rankings?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gamstopbet0 -
Breaking up a site into multiple sites
Hi, I am working on plan to divide up mid-number DA website into multiple sites. So the current site's content will be divided up among these new sites. We can't share anything going forward because each site will be independent. The current homepage will change to just link out to the new sites and have minimal content. I am thinking the websites will take a hit in rankings but I don't know how much and how long the drop will last. I know if you redirect an entire domain to a new domain the impact is negligible but in this case I'm only redirecting parts of a site to a new domain. Say we rank #1 for "blue widget" on the current site. That page is going to be redirected to new site and new domain. How much of a drop can we expect? How hard will it be to rank for other new keywords say "purple widget" that we don't have now? How much link juice can i expect to pass from current website to new websites? Thank you in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | timdavis0 -
SEO on Jobs sites: how to deal with expired listings with "Google for Jobs" around
Dear community, When dealing with expired job offers on jobs sites from a SEO perspective, most practitioners recommend to implement 301 redirects to category pages in order to keep the positive ranking signals of incoming links. Is it necessary to rethink this recommendation with "Google for Jobs" is around? Google's recommendations on how to handle expired job postings does not include 301 redirects. "To remove a job posting that is no longer available: Remove the job posting from your sitemap. Do one of the following: Note: Do NOT just add a message to the page indicating that the job has expired without also doing one of the following actions to remove the job posting from your sitemap. Remove the JobPosting markup from the page. Remove the page entirely (so that requesting it returns a 404 status code). Add a noindex meta tag to the page." Will implementing 301 redirects the chances to appear in "Google for Jobs"? What do you think?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | grnjbs07175 -
Splitting One Site Into Two Sites Best Practices Needed
Okay, working with a large site that, for business reasons beyond organic search, wants to split an existing site in two. So, the old domain name stays and a new one is born with some of the content from the old site, along with some new content of its own. The general idea, for more than just search reasons, is that it makes both the old site and new sites more purely about their respective subject matter. The existing content on the old site that is becoming part of the new site will be 301'd to the new site's domain. So, the old site will have a lot of 301s and links to the new site. No links coming back from the new site to the old site anticipated at this time. Would like any and all insights into any potential pitfalls and best practices for this to come off as well as it can under the circumstances. For instance, should all those links from the old site to the new site be nofollowed, kind of like a non-editorial link to an affiliate or advertiser? Is there weirdness for Google in 301ing to a new domain from some, but not all, content of the old site. Would you individually submit requests to remove from index for the hundreds and hundreds of old site pages moving to the new site or just figure that the 301 will eventually take care of that? Is there substantial organic search risk of any kind to the old site, beyond the obvious of just not having those pages to produce any more? Anything else? Any ideas about how long the new site can expect to wander the wilderness of no organic search traffic? The old site has a 45 domain authority. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Is it bad for SEO to have a page that is not linked to anywhere on your site?
Hi, We had a content manager request to delete a page from our site. Looking at the traffic to the page, I noticed there were a lot of inbound links from credible sites. Rather than deleting the page, we simply removed it from the navigation, so that a user could still access the page by clicking on a link to it from an external site. Questions: Is it bad for SEO to have a page that is not directly accessible from your site? If no: do we keep this page in our Sitemap, or remove it? If yes: what is a better strategy to ensure the inbound links aren't considered "broken links" and also to minimize any negative impact to our SEO? Should we delete the page and 301 redirect users to the parent page for the page we had previously hidden?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jnew9290 -
How does having multiple pages on similar topics affect SEO?
Hey everyone, On our site we have multiple pages that have similar content. As an example, we have a section on Cars (in general) and then specific pages for Used Cars, European Cars, Remodeled Cars etc. Much of the content is similar on these page and the only difference is some content and the additional term in the URL (for example car.com/remodeled-cars and /european-cars). In the past few months, we've noticed a dip in our organic ranking and started doing research. Also, we noticed that Google, in SERPs, shows the general page (cars.com/cars) and not the specific page (/european-cars), even if the specific page has more content. Can having multiple pages with similar content hurt SEO? If so, what is the best way to remedy this? We can consolidate some of the pages and make the difference between them a little clearer, but does it make that much of a difference for rankings? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JonathonOhayon0 -
How Do I Generate a Sitemap for a Large Wordpress Site?
Hello Everyone! I am working with a Wordpress site that is in Google news (i.e. everyday we have about 30 new URLs to add to our sitemap) The site has years of articles, resulting in about 200,000 pages on the site. Our strategy so far has been use a sitemap plugin that only generates the last few months of posts, however we want to improve our SEO and submit all the URLs in our site to search engines. The issue is the plugins we've looked at generate the sitemap on-the-fly. i.e. when you request the sitemap, the plugin then dynamically generates the sitemap. Our site is so large that even a single request for our sitemap.xml ties up tons of server resources and takes an extremely long time to generate the sitemap (if the page doesn't time out in the process). Does anyone have a solution? Thanks, Aaron
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alloydigital0 -
Duplicate page titles Wordpress SEO/Yoast
Hi I have a Wordpress site using the Wordpress SEO plugin by Yoast. Everything appears to be fine except that on 1 Feb SEOMoz crawl suddenly picked up a bunch of errors. The errors are duplicate page titles, and these exist only for the mysite.com/page/X pages. I can't find any setting in Yoast that looks wrong or tells me how to fix this. The pages are also dynamically canonicalizing to themselves - not sure if this makes any difference although I don't know how this is happening. Does anyone know how to fix this duplicate title error? Alex
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alextanner0