Not all CMS themes are created equal. Some themes may be beautifully designed, but in terms of SEO they are subpar.
After working miserably cross-over in digital marketing campaigns for well-known brands for the past five years, we’ve already seen the advantages, shortcomings, and ugliness of CMS themes. In this post, I’ll outline some of the most important considerations for us to look out for when choosing an SEO-friendly theme.
Table of Contents
#1 Page Loading Speed
Many CMS themes come with a package of various features that actually make the page loading speed slow. While it doesn’t always represent accurately, we recommend that you run a demo theme page through a tool like Pingdom to see how quickly the theme loads all of its pages. Ideally, it should be under 1.5 seconds.
If you’ve bought a theme that you really like but find it to be slow to load, we recommend you to use Gzip, compress the existing code, be it css, javascript and html.
#2 Weapon Immune Codes
Poor coding will cause many problems, including making it easier for hackers to penetrate your site. Makes loading speeds slow, and cross-browser design issues. All of these things have an impact on SEO, so it’s a good idea to make sure that the theme is carefully coded in HTML5 and CSS3.
#3 Responsive Design
Most of my websites now receive more than 30% of traffic from mobile devices. Some of them have even crossed the 50% limit. The basic thing that needs to be considered for the sake of SEO of a website in 2014 is to use a responsive CMS theme. Unless you want more than a third of your visitors to have a bad experience with your website.
When choosing a responsive WordPess theme, rest assured that ideally it should be responsive on every device screen – accessible with a smart-TV and legible through Nokia phone features. Because, responsive design is not just about iPhones or iPads.
#4 User Experience
Providing a great user experience for your visitors is really fundamental, especially now that Google is taking a deeper look at the behavior of the metrics and the quality of experience you offer to your web visitors.
#5 Site Architecture
Since the update to Panda, site design has been a high priority on our list when it comes to on-site SEO. The theme you use largely determines how you structure your internal links, navigation, and content hierarchy. Make sure that no page should be clicked more than 3 times from the main page.
#6 Social Media Integration
One of the considerations that is often overlooked when choosing a theme is how well the theme can adapt the share button to multiple social media. In addition, it is also important to note whether it is marked to enable authority and social meta data. Of course, there are plugins like CMS SEO and Social WP that will cover this issue for you, but that doesn’t need to be done if your theme already supports those features.
What may be less easy to customize when using a plugin is how the design to customize the share button to page and post templates. It needs to be neatly customized, attractive, and ideally always stuck to the page or post template, so that users can share the post from any point within the article.
In addition, to do so in more detail, you can follow a more comprehensive CMS guide for social media sharing plugins.
#7 Plugin Compatibility
There are some CMS themes that, even though they look great, are still incompatible or will have bugs when used with the latest version of the CMS, or certain plugins. If you install such a plugin, it is better to uninstall the plugin instead of deleting the theme. However, it is a good idea to purchase a theme that has been tested and has updated compatibility with the latest version of the CMS plugin and CMS.
#8 Content Style
Many popular CMS themes that have emerged recently lack support for long content, which is very contrary to SEO best practices. Therefore, we recommend avoiding portfolio-type themes if you are not a photographer who doesn’t really care about website rankings on Google. Photo sites with little space for this content are very difficult to get Google rankings, so be careful in this regard.
#9 Microdata Markup
If you run a website that contains reviews, recipes, or any type of format that is supported by Schema.org you should focus on finding a theme that supports the procurement of Microdata. So google can display the star rating of your content or pieces of data such as the content title, URL address, owner, and location in the SERPs.
Note: To learn more about basic SEO strategies you can visit the advanced SEO guide by InkThemes.
Conclusion: Choosing a suitable CMS theme is indeed quite difficult and time-consuming, and the most important thing is to do it right, as it’s like building the foundation on which your site will stand. A bad foundation will lead to poor development results. Therefore, when you want to choose the next theme, make sure you have considered all the points mentioned above.
Source : inkthemes.com/9-tips-for-choosing-an-seo-friendly-wordpress-theme/04/