A WordPress website can load slowly due to poor-quality hosting not matching the traffic, no caching in place, no content delivery network (CDN) to help reduce hosting load, plugins, or themes. All of these factors can affect site performance, which can also significantly affect your business.
In this article, you’ll learn the reasons why your WordPress theme can affect your site performance, allowing you to prevent the consequences by taking the appropriate steps.
Reasons Your WordPress Theme Affect Your Site’s Performance
WordPress (WP) is a Content Management System (CMS) that revolutionized the internet, allowing anyone to create a website in just minutes even without coding knowledge. Customizing WP sites creates plenty of opportunities for aspiring bloggers and online entrepreneurs using themes and templates.
But, do WordPress themes affect site performance?
- WordPress Theme Can Affect SEO Performance
Remember that choosing the right WordPress template can impact SEO performance in many different ways you can imagine. Good search engine optimization (SEO) makes your website appear on the first pages of search engines by optimizing your web pages using relevant keywords, authority links, and the right WordPress template.
A WP site tends to confuse search engines because Google and other search engines see the code and not your website itself. Search engines won’t understand codes that are not well structured and HTML tags that are incorrectly placed. It means that search engines won’t know what your website is all about, affecting your ranking.
Here are following tips to make your WP site SEO-friendly:
- Prioritize Content: Your theme should effectively point to search engines the most important part of your web content. Avoid creating and uploading duplicate content. All content tabs in customized templates must use the proper HTML tags.
- HTML Markup: SEO friendliness is shown by using Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML), which is a programming language. Correct HTML5 tags highlight the important web content parts and their subordinates. Using HTML markup, your template must be easy to understand by search engines.
- Responsive Design and Images: For improved traffic, make sure that your WP site loads well on smartphones and other mobile devices. Use a single code or design that fits all screen widths. While responsive designs utilize the same Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) file (shows how HTML elements are displayed on the screen), you can also load them separately.
- WordPress Theme Can Affect Page Speed
Since poor or slow page speed can affect user experience, loading time is crucial to any website. WordPress themes have different ways of loading multiple images, which can affect the page speed. Improperly coded WordPress theme not hosted on powerful servers won’t only affect loading time but also your website’s security.
Here are tips to help improve your WordPress site’s speed:
- Your landing pages and homepage should be well optimized and load quickly.
- Show only excerpts or summaries instead of full posts on your homepage.
- Reduce your number of posts.
- Control the number of WP posts on the settings page. Go to ‘Settings’ then ‘Reading.’
- Remove all unnecessary things, like random widgets, in your web pages, and focus on content for a more strategic customer experience.
- WordPress Theme Can Affect User Experience
A crucial metric of any site performance is user experience or how online users perceive the looks and navigation of your website, which is highly determined by your WordPress theme. A bad theme or too many plugins clutter your website, which slows down your website, cause conflicts when new versions come out, and security issues.
Thus, choosing the right WordPress theme for your WP site is crucial to improve the user experience. Here are some tips when choosing the WP themes and plugins for your website:
- Check Images: Filter images you won’t be replacing, such as icons and backgrounds, and use image filtering tools, like TinyPNG. You can also compress core images to avoid slow load time.
- Check the Headings: For a customized theme, using codes and tags wisely must be done. Press CTRL + U on the demo theme and look for ‘<h1’ and ‘<h2. Each web page must only have one H1 tag or main title with multiple H2 but should have the same font style and size.
- Fix the Theme: Adding caching and image optimization plugins can resolve issues and allow you to use the current theme that you prefer on your website.
Conclusion
Your WordPress theme can affect your site performance in many different ways. As discussed above, your WordPress theme can affect the page speed of your website, depending on the number of images and programming codes used. Also, your WordPress theme can affect your ranking (SEO) or how search engines take a look at your content and overall user experience.
Robert Hugo has been working as a blogger for years and has gained the loyalty of countless readers from different parts of the globe. Robert covers a wide variety of topics on his blogs, and often publishes guests post in other online platforms, as well.
During his leisure time, Robert loves to spend time in the kitchen and play with his pets at home.
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