Best WordPress Theme for SEO

• Mary Cuver

• 21 Aug 2021

Looking for the best SEO friendly WordPress theme for your site? check out our list of best SEO friendly themes in 2021 for any website.

 

SEO friendly WordPress themes play a vital role in ranking your content on Google and other search engines.

Although several factors affect a site’s ranking, such as backlinks, your content quality, on-page optimization, and Web hosting, a well-optimized WordPress theme holds equal importance as a perfect building foundation of your website.

WordPress has a plethora of Themes specially designed for business, blogs, services and multipurpose websites, yet not all of them are SEO optimized. A visually appealing WordPress Theme looks great, but it might not be the best one to get your posts to rank higher in Google.

So, we have hand-picked some of the best SEO optimized WordPress Themes that are still good in 2021 and will help your website get a better position in Google.

GeneratePress WordPress Theme

GeneratePress is one of the best free SEO-friendly WordPress themes that can be used to create any website.

GeneratePress SEO Friendly Features

• GeneratePress is extremely SEO friendly and lightweight because of its clean and minimal codebase.
• Site speed is an important aspect that Google counts when ranking a website in search engine result pages where GeneratePress wins as it quickly loads pages and content. GeneratePress download file is less than 1 MB. That’s pretty enough to ensure its feather-light.
• Google reads your website’s data better when you have applied schema microdata to your website, and GeneratePress is fully schema microdata integrated. It helps a lot in your site’s ranking.
• GeneratePress is bundled with highly attractive responsive templates that will accelerate your website designing process other than these SEO-friendly features.
• In the premium version, you’ll get the most innovative feature, “block-based theme builder”, that can let you create any aspect of your website without using code.
• GeneratePress responsive layouts help you earn extra SEO-friendly status, where you can create a separate header for your website to load faster on any smartphone browser.
• Also, GeneratePress works fine with Elementor page builder and Beaver Builder.

GeneratePress free version is packed with many valuable themes features; however, if you like to get additional customization controls and professionally designed starter sties, go for the premium version.

Astra WordPress Theme

Astra is also packed with SEO friendly features, and you can fully control and customize any element on your site. Is Astra theme SEO friendly? I would instantly say yes because most of the features of the Astra theme are built keeping in view SEO standards. Astra’s most SEO-friendly feature includes clean coded site performance, built-in schema markups and optimized Header and Footer sections.

Astra SEO friendly Features

• With the Astra theme, you’ll have complete control on Header and Footer section customization, and each design is easily customizable where you can edit keywords.
• Astra also provides niche-based theme templates; suppose you want to create a pet blog, you’ll find a dog-themed template that increases your visibility on the search engine.
• Adding optimized layouts and designs is no more a difficult task with Astra, and you can customize all elements, including header and footer, text boxes, or logos.
• Astra is fully integrated with Schema markup, which helps Google and other search engines to identify your website’s structure.
• Astra is fully compatible with all leading page builders like Elementor, Beaver Builder and Brizy, and you can customize all of the pre-built templates in your desired way.
• Along with many other SEO friendly features, one of the remarkable features is its highly lightweight download file which comprises only 50 KB. With the default data only, the Astra theme will load in just 0.5 sec.

Astra Pro is enriched with many advanced features. Check here the pricing.

 

Divi WordPress theme

Divi is another top-notch WordPress theme built with SEO optimized features. You’ll find a good selection of pre-built websites packed with SEO-optimised features that cover almost all types of website niches imaginable. Let’s find out is Divi good for SEO?

Divi SEO friendly Features

• Divi Theme is specifically designed for novice coding or designers or developers looking for convenient ways to build a website.
• You can create and customize any corner of your site with the inbuilt Divi drag and drop builder. Also, if you like to do some custom works, you can find Divi plugins to accompany you from your WordPress dashboard.
• However, as we all know, clean coding is an essential part of any website when it comes to Website ranking, and with Divi builder code base becomes super messy, just like with any other drag and drop page builder. Extensive use of shortcodes all over your web page clogs up meta descriptions and CSS classes just because you want to move a box from right to left. Therefore, the more you customize any elements using the drag and drop facility, the more you’ll be adding shortcodes to your website, the slower your website goes. Divi builder is slower than any other page builder. It’s a heavily programmed builder, and some other builders like Beaver builder or Oxygen work a bit faster than Divi builder.
• So, by large, Divi isn’t an SEO tool, basically, and we don’t say it’s bad for SEO by itself; it’s mainly because of the drag and drop builder that slows down your site speed because of extensive use of shortcodes.

Here is the pricing plan for the Divi theme along with Divi builder.

Genesis Theme Framework

Genesis is one of my favourite SEO optimized WordPress themes for high-speed loading and total flexibility. Genesis works efficiently due to its lean and clean coding structure.

Genesis theme framework SEO friendly Features

• Another SEO friendly feature of Genesis is that most of the on-page SEO features are included in Genesis by default, such as Headings, tags, meta tags, robots’ attributes. Therefore, as a beginner, you need not install an SEO plugin because Genesis has its unique SEO framework to support page SEO.
• Furthermore, Genesis follows Google’s standards, and by default, post titles are H1 and sidebar titles are H3.
• Clean HTML and CSS codes let search engines understand easily your site’s structure and it helps a lot in your website ranking.
• Your site’s layout is equally important for SEO, and by default, Genesis will create your site’s layout in blog-style rather than magazine-style; it helps google spiders to understand and index your site’s content fully.
• Genesis is fully compatible with schema.org code that’s essential for featured snippets.
• Because of lightweight code, Genesis loads faster on Mobile screens, and its layouts are highly responsive.
• Another SEO friendly aspect of Genesis theme is that it’s packed with an actual number of built-in features, such as Custom Header and footer options, Multiple page layouts, custom background, full-width templates and Custom widgets. The benefit of using limited Customizable features is that it won’t slow down your website loading speed if tons of built-in featured WordPress themes. Genesis includes only those features which are essential in designing any website layout so you could get a nice layout and fast loading speed at the same time.

OceanWP theme

OceanWP is a free WordPress theme that doesn’t offer a pro version. Instead, it offers paid extensions to enhance the useability of free themes. Moreover, since its launch in 2016, OceanWP has been installed over 700,000 times, which that’s quite a huge success. The features which make this theme stands out are;

OceanWP SEO friendly Features

• Lightweight and fully responsive layouts
• Free and paid extensions to further enhance the theme’s functionality.
• WooCommerce compatible with pro extension to enhance free version features
• Pre-built demos ready to be installed and activated with a single click
• SEO friendly layouts which can be customized easily
• OceanWP is supported by almost all types of page builders especially works best with Elementor
• RTL ready and compatible with all types of RTL language.

Does change WordPress Theme affects SEO?

If you have already installed a WordPress theme on your site and consider moving your site to a more SEO-friendly WordPress theme, keep in mind that changing your theme will affect your site speed, site’s design, content formatting, and structured data. If you take a site speed test and your site loads in more than 2 seconds, check your WordPress theme’s compatibility and structure. Because other than your web hosting, several plugins used, and cache minimizing system, your theme’s functionality also matters a lot and greatly affects your site’s SEO.

Final Words

The WordPress themes we enlisted above are some of the best SEO friendly WordPress themes tried and tested over thousands of websites. These SEO optimized themes can help you in competing with your competitors with the best SEO techniques. So, which one you find the most useful for your site? Leave your reply in the comment section.