10 Best SEO WordPress Themes and Key Features to Look For

Choosing the best SEO WordPress theme for your website isn’t just about aesthetics – the theme should also have optimal performance.

When choosing the template, you can filter them based on the editor you’re going to use, such as WordPress’s own Block Editor.

Don’t worry if you can’t set up custom colors during this stage, you’ll be able to tweak the style later from the site editor.

Yes, your chosen WordPress theme can impact SEO performance. A theme affects site speed, mobile responsiveness, and code quality, all of which are SEO ranking factors. Choosing a clean, well-coded, and fast-loading theme should improve SEO.

Key Features

How We Tested the Best SEO WordPress Themes

There are actually many data points inside each tool that we keep an eye on. To make it simpler for you, here are the primary metrics you should pay attention to. There’s also a table in the next section for you to easily review the themes’ performance:

On desktop, Kadence also performed great, with a score of 99. The main recommendation from PageSpeed Insights was to serve static assets with an efficient cache policy, which can be fixed by installing a WordPress caching plugin.

For portfolios, Inspiro integrates with the WPZOOM Portfolio plugin, enabling you to create a portfolio section on your website. While a free version is available, the premium plan offers more useful features. Alternatively, you can just make a regular gallery using WordPress’s Block Editor.

Last updated – We focused on themes updated within the last six months at the time of writing to ensure they’re current with the latest web standards.
Rating and reviews – We prioritized themes with user ratings of 4 or above, ideally closer to 4.5. We also considered user reviews to get an idea of the genuine user experiences.
Active installations – It served as an indicator of a theme’s popularity and perceived reliability, with higher numbers suggesting a more tested and trusted theme.

We also verified each theme’s compatibility with popular WordPress SEO plugins like Yoast SEO, AIOSEO, and Rank Math, which are crucial for optimizing a site’s visibility in SERP. So, rest assured that all themes included in this list are compatible with those SEO plugins.

However, it was noted that some tap targets were not appropriately sized. We fixed this by applying the best practices for mobile-friendly websites. In this case, make the buttons and links large enough to tap and provide enough space around them to ensure a better mobile experience.

Default Speed Test, Clean Core Check, and Built-in Schema Markup Check

Its efficiency is further validated on GTMetrix, where it scored 99%, with a swift load time of 978 milliseconds for a minimal page size of 39.7 KB and just 6 page requests.

Performance – The weighted average of the metric scores, which include elements like content size, speed index, and total blocking time. The closer it is to 100, the better.
Fully loaded time – The time needed for the site to show everything, including all the images, ads, and below-the-fold content, until after network and CPU activities have idled for a specific period. The faster it is, the better.
Page requests – The individual network requests a browser makes to fetch all the necessary resources to display a webpage, including HTML files, CSS stylesheets, JavaScript scripts, and images. The number of these requests can significantly impact a site’s load time, as each requires a round trip to the server. The lower the score, the better.
Page size – The total size of all the content and assets on a webpage that is fetched by the page requests, such as text content, images, and stylesheets. Larger page sizes require more data to be transferred and processed, potentially slowing down the page loading time.
Time to First Byte (TTFB) – It measures the time between a client making an HTTP request and the first byte of the page being received by the browser. It indicates the responsiveness of your web server. A lower TTFB can lead to a better user experience, as it means your page starts loading faster.

Customization options within the theme’s customizer itself focus on essentials like site identity and homepage settings, with more extensive customization available through Qi Addons.

Then, we selected our candidates based on these aspects:

Once you install the theme, a dedicated menu will appear in the WordPress dashboard. It will guide you through site customization with a quick starter guide and direct access to specific settings.

May 07, 2024

To optimize your WordPress SEO, choose a reliable SEO theme, use an SEO plugin like Yoast SEO, create quality content with keywords, improve site speed with caching plugins, and optimize your site for mobile. Additionally, generate XML sitemaps, use social media as part of your digital marketing strategy, and acquire quality backlinks.

Key Features

Moreover, Google applies mobile-first indexing, which prioritizes the mobile version of a website for indexing and ranking. This makes mobile optimization critical to maintaining the best user experience and search engine performance.

It scored slightly lower at 92 for SEO, primarily due to the absence of meta descriptions in the bare theme used for testing, which was expected as there was barely any content there. This is easily fixable by adding meta descriptions to your content once you create them.

10 Best WordPress Themes for SEO

After installing the theme, Qi will recommend the Qode Essential Addons plugin, which unlocks additional features and provides access to demo sites.

	PageSpeed	GTmetrix	Price
Kadence	Mobile performance: 100Desktop performance: 99	Performance: 99%Fully loaded time: 1.4 sPage request: 9Page size: 49.7 kbTTFB: 670 ms	Freemium, starting at $149/year
Astra	Mobile performance: 100Desktop performance: 100	Performance: 100%Fully loaded time: 720 msPage request: 6Page size: 53.1 kbTTFB: 593 ms	Freemium, starting at $49/year
Hostinger Blog Theme	Mobile performance: 99Desktop performance: 100	Performance: 98%Fully loaded time: 1.9 sPage request: 13Page size: 346 kbTTFB: 657 ms	Free
Sydney	Mobile performance: 99Desktop performance: 96	Performance: 99%Fully loaded time: 1.1 sPage request: 7Page size: 39 kbTTFB: 463 ms	Freemium, starting at $55/year
OceanWP	Mobile performance: 97Desktop performance: 100	Performance: 100%Fully loaded time: 1.8 sPage request: 22Page size: 325 kbTTFB: 585 ms	Freemium, starting at $35/year
Neve	Mobile performance: 100Desktop performance: 100	Performance: 99%Fully loaded time: 978 msPage request: 6Page size: 39.7 kbTTFB: 430 ms	Freemium, starting at $69/year
Qi	Mobile performance: 89Desktop performance: 95	Performance: 98%Fully loaded time: 1.4 sPage request: 12Page size: 120 kbTTFB: 441 ms	Freemium, starting at $79/year
Raft	Mobile performance: 92Desktop performance: 94	Performance: 99%Fully loaded time: 1.1 sPage request: 13Page size: 149 kbTTFB: 585 ms	Free
Inspiro	Mobile performance: 97Desktop performance: 98	Performance: 98%Fully loaded time: 1.3 sPage request: 13Page size: 692 kbTTFB: 518 ms	Freemium, starting at $79/year
Responsive	Mobile performance: 99Desktop performance: 99	Performance: 99%Fully loaded time: 1.5 sPage request: 8Page size: 81.3 kbTTFB: 500 ms	Freemium, starting at $29.50/year

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In this article, we will dive into the top 10 WordPress SEO themes. You’ll get to know the themes’ key features, pros and cons, suitability for various website types, and speed test results.

1. Kadence

Moreover, Astra offers various customization options, including:

After the initial test, we set up one of the theme’s demo pages with the required WordPress plugins to simulate a real-world scenario. Then, we did another speed test.

Designed as a multipurpose theme, Kadence is ideal for a wide range of websites. It offers 50 free templates tailored for various niches, from cleaning services to influencers, demonstrating its adaptability.

Key Features

It boasts impressive performance metrics, with PageSpeed Insights giving it a 99 for mobile score and a perfect 100 for desktop. GTMetrix tests revealed that it has a full load time of 1.9 seconds, with the theme’s page size at 346 KB with 13 page requests.

The first issue is fixable by editing the robots.txt file via WordPress SEO plugins like Yoast SEO or AIOSEO so search engines can properly crawl your site. Meanwhile, to fix the second issue, you can optimize cumulative layout shifts (CLS), which is one of the SERP ranking factors.

First things first, each theme was installed on a clean WordPress environment without any plugins to prevent external factors from influencing the results.

We’ve explored our top 10 SEO-friendly WordPress themes. Now, the decision rests with you, so be sure to select a theme that aligns with your site’s requirements.

Kadence stands out as a versatile block theme with exceptional mobile performance.

Our GTMetrix speed test results further highlighted OceanWP’s efficiency, showing a 100% performance score with a quick full load time of 537 milliseconds for a page size of 177 KB and 21 page requests.

Translation-ready – Raft is translation-ready and RTL-ready, ensuring accessibility for a global audience.

9. Inspiro

Parallax image showcase – Display your visual assets strikingly by making the images move at different speeds on scroll.
Pricing table – Create multiple tables with prices to showcase different pricing packages or plans that each contain various features or services.

Initial Research and Selection

How Do I Optimize My WordPress SEO?

Schema markup can also improve how your content appears on SERPs. For instance, search results for a product might display ratings, price, and availability, while recipes could show cooking times, calorie counts, and user ratings.

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Once you have installed this theme, check the theme dashboard to access several shortcuts to customizer settings, like site layout adjustments and navigation menu editing.

Key Features