How A Website Theme Change Can Affect Search Engine Rankings?

By Author: Way2webscape
Total Articles: 7
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Does changing the website theme anyway impact the website ranking? Many people have noticed some changes in their website ranking every time they have changed the website theme. But, is this the only reason? There are many other reasons as well. A new theme in itself will not change anything until and unless you change the data presentation.

How your websites rankings drop when you change the website theme?

HTML order is important
Search Engines read HTML in a linear fashion. This however does not mean that the search engine reads it in the same order as it is there on the website. Now, when you change a theme where you move the previous right side bar to the left one, the spiders will crawl the side bar content earlier than the main body text. This is going to affect the ranking. It is therefore, very important to maintain the page coding order in the right sense.

To put in simple words, if any changes in the theme changes the way HTML code is read by search engine spiders, this can affect the website rankings.

Meta Data

Meta data is still considered to be important for search engine ...
... ranking. At least try to keep the same SEO plugin as in the previous theme. This will ensure that search engine rankings are not affected with theme change.

Moreover, ensure that you do not change the Meta descriptions and the title tags, as it could affect the website listing in the search engines.

Permalinks Change

The URLs that lead to your blog posts are the permalinks and you have to make sure that they remain the same as it was there in the old theme. This is important as the bloggers will use the same permalink for back linking and for you it will be a link back from another website or webpage on to your website.

If you do not pay heed to this aspect, the drop in rankings is for sure. However, of you are facing some problem in creating the same permalinks with your new theme; make sure you create a redirect 301 to the original permalink URL.

Some other reasons for change in rankings
Page speed and bounce rate

Speed has become a major factor these days as people do not want to wait and they will switch over to the next website in their list if the page they are trying to open takes longer to load. Compare the loading speed of your old and new them in order to lower the bounce rate.

W3C validation

Make sure that the HTML in your new theme is W3C validated especially when it was validate din the old theme and not the new one. Such a mistake could show up crawling errors and might impact the rankings.
Ensure that you look up to all these points before going live with your website, as neither the visitors nor the search engines are going to spare you.