what makes a wordpress theme seo friendlyChoosing a WordPress theme will play a huge part in the potential SEO success of the website. Unfortunately, most people choose a theme based on appearance. This is not what you want to do. When you choose the perfect theme you want to also focus on how good it is for future SEO campaigns. It would be a shame to buy high quality SEO links and not climb in rankings because of simply choosing a theme that sabotages your optimization strategies.

As you look at the thousands of free and paid WordPress themes around, analyze the following factors.

A Valid Configuration

The WordPress theme you opt for needs to utilize the coding standards that are the most modern at the moment. It needs to be compatible with all browsers and include valid CSS and HTML coding. Also, you want to be sure that it will work well on mobile devices. Code validators are available for you to do this.

Upload Speed

Google’s ranking algorithm does take load time into account as a very important factor. This is why the theme you choose should include media files that are smaller, CSS files that are optimized and you should choose hosting packages that have fast response times. Generally speaking, the theme needs to load in under 2 seconds when no plugins are added.

Responsive Design

In 2017 you have absolutely no excuse for having a website that is not responsive. Google will actively drop rankings for the sites that are not built around a responsive frame. The reason for this is that mobile device use is on the rise. Nowadays, half of the traffic a site gets is normally from mobile gadgets. You simply do not want to have 50% of your visitors have a bad viewing experience so the theme has to be responsive.

Site Structure

The architecture of a website is a huge part of site planning. If navigation, content and inner links are properly structured the search engine robots will find it much easier to index the pages after crawling them. Site ranking becomes better because the visitor’s experience is improved as he/she can easily find the desired content. Always look at the layout structure of the site, its logic and navigation. Live template demos have to be analyzed for usability.

Plugins

Some of the WordPress themes will come with a suite of included plugins that are needed in order for everything to look just like in the live demo. Unfortunately, in various cases we are faced with simply too much added. The plugins basically end up consuming too many server resources and site loading time becomes lower than it should be. Even if you use extra plugins to make loading times lower, you can end up with something that is not optimal. You want to learn as much as possible about what the theme uses in order to look like it does. Whenever too many plugins are on the list, you want to consider other options as you would end up with better SEO results on the long run.