Hi tebrown,
In theory, changing your theme should not affect your rankings. In practice, it can have an effect but this is typically temporary whilst Google works out that it’s still your site and your content. Just make sure you set up 301 redirections if you change the URLs for any content on your site as this will have the most effect.
Hi wpsmort,
Thanks for your reply. I currently have a placeholder theme active while I am working on the improved website. The placeholder theme only has one page that holds the meta data. With the new theme I will be creating multiple pages (home, about, work, clients, contact) – what do you suggest I do here? – do I keep the current placeholder page and rename it home?
Cheers
tebrown
Ok thanks. Will renaming it cause any conflict with it’s google ranking?
Renaming that page should not have any affect.
I just upgraded my site’s template. I had the same worries. Talked to an SEO about this. This is what he said,
Make sure the URL structure does not change,
The content, text and images with alt text are more or less same,
The site should load fast, (use a cache plugin),
Check speed and experience metric with PageSpeed Insights
If all these are kept in check the site’s rankings wont fluctuate. We did this and the results were what he promised.
