What Are The Best SEO Friendly WordPress Themes?

Website templates are a big deal for SEO. You know this!

While we keep track of a range of different metrics and work with different aspects of our websites you absolutely can’t afford to skimp on your theme.

There are more WordPress themes out there than you can shake a stick at but not all are created equal.

While you might find yourself fond of a specific themed template it may be horribly optimized when it comes to SEO.

Although a well-optimized theme won’t be the single cause for your success it’s certainly a detail within your greater plan that you absolutely can’t afford to skimp on or avoid completely. So which are the best SEO-friendly WordPress themes?

Recommended WordPress Themes for SEO

There are thousands of WordPress themes out there. It can be an exhausting process trying to haul through a wide list of templates, having to validate each one that catches your eye for reviews.

We’ll save some time for you today by providing our own list of tailored recommendations. All of these themes will come complete with a range of well-optimized features that will ensure that you don’t miss out on valuable SEO through any fault in your site.

Let’s get to it!

Avada

This is one of the world’s bestselling SEO-optimized WordPress themes. Having reached well over one hundred thousand paying customers since its inception Avada is very powerful and an industry-standard theme used for an enormous range of sites.

A key draw for Avada that’s well recognized is that it’s SEO optimized without sacrificing any ease of use or style limitations. Thanks to a powerful framework, many users have found this is their theme of choice for making sure their SEO is covered without losing out on visual content.

Key points

• Fully SEO optimized
• Comes ready for Retina and WooCommerce
• Easily tailored by experts and beginners
• Highly responsive
• Comes with a great admin panel making feature access simple
• MegaMenu comes built in as standard

Schema

Everyone who knows themes knows Schema. It’s a direct SEO-tailored theme developed by the team at MyThemeShop.

A key draw for this theme over others is the load speed. Its selling point is that it’s the fastest draw in the west so to speak. While this is an easy claim to make, the proof in the pudding is that Schema is used by a very sizeable amount of websites with great SEO success. It also has a few interesting tricks up its sleeves such as pre-configured rich snippets and a tailored review system.

Some key points in Schema’s favor

• Its pre-configured rich snippets feature is fantastic. We covered rich snippets in a recent article and the ability to work with this is a big plus in Schema’s favor
• It’s a very lightweight and agile theme as is its biggest boast. If you have identified load speed as a very high priority for your website then you can’t go wrong here
• Its easy UI can make it more accessible to members of your team who might struggle with other more technical themes
• Has further functionality such as built-in reviews and voting functionality for social media

Magazine

This is a three-column theme created by the Themify team. This one comes out of the box working with Retina immediately. That is a draw for some companies who need it to be consistent across all mobile and desktop devices while still retaining the full quality of any graphic elements that might be present on the site. That’s a big plus with Apple and Android products.

We’re including Magazine partially as it’s so easy to set up a consistent page. You can reach the quality of big news sites such as MSN and BBC within a short space of time. Its helpful styling panel also aids in keeping your theme fully on point.

Let’s cover a few key points:

• Retina ready right away – as we’ve discussed this is a real benefit for those who need it
• The very smooth and adaptive design feels great in how it responds
• A wide variety of options for your layouts and sidebars go well together with a great range of skins and colors
• Widgets available
• Comes well-optimized for SEO use as standard

Eleven40 Pro

Built around HTML5 this fantastic theme comes with pixel perfect layout and design. Its intelligent setup means it’s very flexible and responsive to the full range of mobile devices out there in the modern world.

A great benefit of Eleven40 Pro is how easily it scales with a range of resolutions. You won’t have any frustrating results here even if you are an oddball with a unique resolution on your desktop.

Load times are also killer on this theme. Lightning’s fast response times go very well with its intelligent scaling, giving a very positive first impression for site visitors.

The features:

• The scaling works beautifully regardless of the resolution being used
• Great scaling is hand in hand with extremely impressive load times
• Well-optimized for SEO with a host of in-house features right out of the box
• An easily customized options panel
• A range of lovely designs and colors to tailor to your needs
• HTML5 and CSS3 were kept in mind during its design and setup

Parallax Pro

You’ll need the Genesis Framework to make the best use of Parallax.

The good news is that any theme that is based or built around the Genesis Framework will be naturally SEO friendly. All child themes from the Framework share this trait.

Parallax is extremely popular amongst bloggers. A range of the top blogs on the net nowadays makes use of this theme.

It’s a great choice to look at, coming with a fantastic structure for SEO and extremely rapid load speeds. The theme is capable to the point where minimal maintenance and awareness are needed with the theme doing most of the mundane work associated with SEO.

It’s also a flexible and easily tailored site theme where you can amend and change as you desire without losing out on load time and responsiveness.

The good bits

• Works with AdSense out of the box
• Extremely responsive
• Very fast load times
• Can support a range of personalized layouts that you can switch between
• SEO customized with no changes needed

To summarize

We’ve recommended the above themes for some common core reasons. When you’re looking at a new theme for your WordPress site you need to be assured of its quality and have that notion backed up with high numbers of user reviews and recommendations.

You also need a site that will load rapidly without any hitches depending on the user’s device. Customization comes next on the list with the need for an easily tailored theme that does not get cluttered once alterations have been made.

The list provided is a great start. You can rest assured that with all of these offerings you’ll be well cared for in the SEO sense and free to tweak to your heart’s content.