Google’s John Mueller once said, “A website’s theme is not all about the color palate, icons, and overall outer appearance. A myriad of factors is involved that significantly impact your website’s speed, performance, and search engine ranking.”
Building a website can be tricky. However, finding the best website development company to create that website is 2X more challenging. You need an expert who can take care of every tiniest element to ensure your audience has a good experience visiting your website. And if your website is flooded with ugly contrasts and unnecessary things, it might have a negative impact on users.
Now!
Raise your hand if you’re a marketer and you’ve been assigned to “do SEO” for a newly developed website. Easy, right?
It’s no secret that website design and SEO are intertwined. Not just the users, a poorly designed website also affects SEO. For example, Google loves user-friendly websites. A well-structured website is always convenient for visitors and search engines to navigate without a twitch.
If there is anything else, you’ll find your website on page 10, maybe.
Using trending themes and designs is excellent. But, your branding and digital presence have an everlasting impression on end users. So, you must understand how your website theme can impact your search engine ranking and certain SEO elements.
Heads-up: Looking for a reliable web designing company to step up your game? Let’s talk.
Let’s discover how a web design theme can affect SEO

Although the website ranking is mainly affected by the SEO strategies you use, themes also have a tremendous impact – both positive and negative.
Effect on bounce rate
Does your website have attractive visuals? Because if not, visitors won’t feel much convinced or stay longer on your website. That’s why make your website appealing, compelling, and at the same time, not so much over-the-top. Otherwise, you can expect users to just hop off to your competitor’s site.
If your website is well-organized with optimum images and visuals, it’s easy for users to browse and get answers to their queries.
Effect on speed & performance
Speed & performance has a direct impact on bounce rate. For example, if your website takes longer to load due to heavy themes and visuals, users will definitely go to another website that loads faster than yours. This will impact your website rank drastically.
The average loading time for a webpage should be around 1 to 2 seconds. Even if your website takes 3 seconds to load, it’s better than 50% of other websites.
So be considerate when choosing the theme for your website. It will directly affect the SEO and loading tempo of your website.
Effect on search engine crawling & indexing
It’s true. A poorly chosen web design theme can create havoc in getting on top of SERPs. Some themes are just not compatible with search engine optimization. The coding behind those themes may not be structured well, making it difficult for search engines to read.
A good website designing company keeps these pointers in mind while designing your website
• During crawling, it’s best for Google to understand your business niche, so make sure to use the correct HTML tags.
• What improves your SEO on a great level is providing quality information to Google about your products & services.
• You might need to alter a few things in the theme in the future to make SEO-related improvements and optimize your website. So, the first step is to use a flexible theme.
• Use a theme where you can implement various SEO strategies simultaneously to improve and manage the ranking.
And if you hire Master Infotech as your web design and development company, you don’t need to tell us anything. We’re professionals when it comes to user-friendly & search engine-friendly web designing.
Content formatting
Your web design theme has no direct impact on the content. Instead, it just changes the way it’s formatted. For example, heading tags redundancy that may affect the theme structure. Adding an exact pattern of heading formation solves the issue.
Follow this systematic arrangement to avoid confusion:
• Use Heading 1 or H1 to denote the main titles on your website
• Use Heading 2 or H2 to define subheadings under the main heading
• Use Heading 3 or H3 to depict sub-subheadings that come under H2
Talk to our digital marketing company experts to learn about formatting in detail. They will provide a comprehensive view of heading tags and overall WordPress formatting.
Plug-ins
Themes that require multiple plug-ins to function should be a BIG NAY-NAY. And if you don’t use the necessary plug-ins to make that theme work, it’ll affect your website’s overall speed and performance.
Some premium themes that don’t require such an abundance of plug-ins to perform basic functionality should be chosen.
How to protect your website from the adverse effects of SEO
Build an SEO-friendly web design theme
Your first step in choosing or changing your WordPress theme is to find an SEO-friendly theme. It will boost your site functionality and overall search engine optimization results to help you rank higher in search results.
Secondly, your chosen theme should not negatively impact your site’s loading speed. A slow-loading website delivers a bad experience to end-users, plus they think that your business is not reliable and trustworthy. It also hinders your online visibility. Make sure your theme code is neatly organized and SEO-friendly.
Test drive of a website theme
Test your theme before making it official. This will give you an extensive idea of how your SEO works on it and what its drawbacks are. So, create a staging website, apply the theme for testing, and check it for user-friendly & SEO-friendly behavior.
Don’t forget to use the plug-ins your new theme requires to function correctly. Your website speed will be adversely affected if it contains an unnecessarily high number of plug-ins.
Closing thoughts
Understanding the impact of a web design theme on SEO is crucial. If you have the proper knowledge and choose the suitable theme for your WordPress website, you’ll enjoy the higher spots on search engines. However, getting expert advice on theme selection is the wisest choice because one simple mistake can be an overwhelming disaster for your website.
Hiring a professional website designing company provides a bucket-full of benefits. A specialized team can enhance your website speed and performance and improve its rank.
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