5 Best SEO Friendly WordPress Theme of 2023 [Free & Paid]

Are you looking for an SEO friendly WordPress theme for your blog or website? I've got you covered.

Search Engine Optimization isn't just about creating content that is keyword-rich and relevant - it's also about using the right SEO tools. One of the most important tools that a website owners can use to optimize their site and content is SEO friendly WordPress themes. 

These WordPress themes has been designed keeping SEO in mind to help you get the most out of your blog content. It ensures that your blog is optimized for search engines, making it easier for them to index and rank your blog in the SERPs (search engine result pages).

This means that when someone types a query into a search engine, your blog will be more likely to show up in the results.

In this article, I have covered some of the most popular WordPress themes that are properly optimized for SEO.

The best part?

I've covered only the best WordPress themes that I personally use and are hugely popular among website owners. These themes have been used by million of websites around the world and of course, all of them are SEO-friendly.

Let's get started.

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Best WordPress Theme For SEO

To help you make an informed purchasing decision, I have compiled some of the best SEO friendly WordPress themes that can help you to make your site SEO-optimized and rank it higher on search engines. 

Let's check them out.

1. GeneratePress

GeneratePress is one of the most popular WordPress themes. It is used by more than 200000+ websites. With its intuitive and user-friendly interface, GeneratePress makes it easy to create a beautiful website without any coding knowledge.

Whether you’re a beginner or an experienced webmaster, you’ll find GeneratePress to be an excellent choice for creating and managing your WordPress website.One of the best features of GeneratePress is its flexibility.

With hundreds of settings and options, you can customize your website to fit your needs. From the overall look and feel of the theme to the color scheme and font selection, you can tweak every detail to make your website unique.

It offers both the free and premium versions.

The free theme offers the following features:

• It uses the latest and most stable coding standards.
• The default theme is less than 30 KB in size. Your website will load under 2 to 3 seconds.
• No render-blocking issues with this theme.
• The theme is Search Engine Optimized. It is coded with validated HTML and built-in schema.org structured data.

You can even use popular page builders like Thrive Architect,  Elementor and others with this theme.

The premium version comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee. Thus, it provides a great opportunity to try this wonderful theme risk-free. If you want to learn more, check out the GeneratePress review where I have explained its features & benefits, ease of use, user interface, pricing plans, pros & cons, alternatives and more.

GeneratePress offers the following paid plans - Yearly ($59/year) and Lifetime ($249 one-time payment).

2. Astra

Astra is another very popular WordPress themes that is perfectly optimized for SEO and offers an array of features that give it an edge over other themes.

The theme is incredibly lightweight, meaning it won’t slow down your website or take up too much space on your server. This makes it ideal if you want to create a fast-loading, responsive website without compromising on features.

Astra is also very SEO-friendly, making it easy to optimize your website for search engine visibility and it is also highly customizable. 

You can choose from hundreds of pre-built website templates, or use the theme’s drag-and-drop builder to create your own custom designs. The theme also offers a range of customization options, allowing you to change colors, fonts, and other elements of your website’s design with ease.

Astra offers a free theme with basic features that first-time users would love to try before upgrading to the premium version. The premium pricing plans offered by Astra are - Astra Pro ($59/year), Essential Bundle ($169/year) and Growth Bundle ($249/year).

Get 20% off on all the paid plans using the link given below. At 20% discount, you can buy the Astra Pro plan at $47, Essential Bundle plan at $137 and Growth Bundle plan at $187.

3. Kadence

Kadence is another very popular SEO-friendly theme for WordPress, hands down. It's a WordPress theme that puts SEO at the forefront, allowing you to optimize your website for search engine rankings.

With Kadence, you'll get a performance-optimized theme that loads fast, has modern templates, and is SEO-friendly. The pre-made templates by Kadence are professionally built that can be easily customized to create a unique look and feel for your website.

You can choose from a variety of colors, fonts, and layouts, and create your own unique design. The theme is also fully responsive, so your website will look great on any device.

Kadence also comes with a variety of powerful plugins, allowing you to add extra features to your website and enhance its performance. Whether you’re looking to create a landing page, an ecommerce store, or a membership site, Kadence has a plugin to help you get the job done.

Kadence offers the following pricing plans - Free Forever ($0/month), Essential Bundle ($129/first year) and Full Bundle ($199/first year).

4. Genesis by StudioPress

The fourth SEO friendly theme for WordPress websites that we like the most is Genesis. It is one of the most popular WordPress theme frameworks from StudioPress, a theme hub run by CopyBlogger Media.

Genesis is the core theme that comes with many child themes to control your website’s design and style. You can use these child themes to build your blogs or websites.

This powerful theme framework is designed to make it easy for developers and designers to create beautiful WordPress sites that look and function exactly as intended.

Like GeneratePress and Astra, Genesis also offers a clean and lightweight code that will make your website load very fast. It comes with a range of features, including SEO optimization, built-in security, responsive design, and more.

The theme is also optimized for speed and performance, ensuring that your WordPress website loads quickly and provides a great user experience. It's also optimized for search engines, making sure your website is easily indexed and found in the search results.

With Genesis SEO optimized theme, your website will always be perfectly optimized for search engines resulting in better rankings in SERP.

An annual subscription of Genesis would cost you $360 per year. With your purchase, you get blog library, Genesis Framework, StudioPress themes and can use the theme on unlimited number of websites.

5. Responsive Pro

Responsive Pro is built with semantic best practices and keeping the search engines algorithm in mind. It is one of the better SEO friendly WordPress Themes available. This WordPress theme has a GTmetrix score as high as 96. Therefore, it will ensure your website is SEO friendly.

Additionally, It comes with 15+ Free ready to use site templates for free users. Starting from a blog site to setting up a full fledged eCommerce store, this theme has got you covered.

With more than 40000 active installs, the support is impeccable for Responsive. Responsive is easily translatable into any language with WPML. This even allows you to create a multilingual website.

Responsive comes in both free and premium versions at WordPress.org. You can download the free theme here - Responsive Free theme.

CyberChimps offers three paid plans for Responsive Pro WordPress theme - Personal ($47/year), Business ($67/year) and Pro ($97/year).

Get 50% off on all the paid plans using the link given below. At 50% discount, you can buy the Personal plan at $23.50, Business plan at $33.50 and Pro plan at $48.50. 

Why Use A SEO Friendly Theme?

If you're looking to create a website that’s optimized for search engines, then you should consider using an SEO friendly theme. SEO friendly themes are specially designed to help your website get higher rankings in search engines and to enable it to attract more organic traffic.

When it comes to SEO, there are many factors that can affect your website’s performance, from on-page optimization to off-page optimization to Technical SEO. And while you can implement many of these techniques yourself, having an SEO friendly website theme is definitely a great place to start.

So, why should you use an SEO friendly theme for your website? Here are a few reasons why:

1. Optimized for SEO: SEO friendly themes are designed with SEO in mind. This means that they are usually coded in such a way that it helps search engines crawl and index your website. This helps your website get higher rankings in search results.
2. Easy to Use: SEO friendly themes are usually built with user-friendliness in mind. This makes it easier for you to customize and manage your website without needing to hire a professional developer.
3. Responsive Design: Responsive design is a must nowadays. Search engines prefer websites that are optimized for mobile devices and this is one of the things that an SEO friendly theme offers.
4. Improved Security: Security is a major concern for any website. SEO friendly themes usually come with built-in security features that can help keep your website safe from malicious attacks.
5. Faster Loading Time: Faster loading time is an important factor for SEO. SEO friendly themes are usually optimized to ensure that your website loads quickly, which helps improve your rankings in search engine results.

If you want to improve your website’s visibility and user experience, using an SEO friendly theme is a great way to do so. It helps to optimize your website for search engine crawlers and enhance the user experience, while also making your website more accessible and mobile-friendly.

With the right SEO friendly theme, you can ensure that your website looks great and functions properly, helping to improve website ranking and organic search engine visibility.

What Makes a WordPress theme SEO Friendly?

WordPress themes and templates are an important part of a website’s structure. Many premium themes sell itself by highlighting all sorts of stuff like sliders, carousels, etc. These resource-heavy themes make your website slow to load.

It is estimated that about 50% of users leave a website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. 

This not only increases your bounce rate but also affects your websites sales and revenue. If you use these types of resource-heavy WordPress themes in your blog then you'll see lower rankings even if your content is good.

While the main purpose of a theme or template is to make your website look good and attractive but if a theme is SEO friendly also then it is considered as an added advantage.

Thus, before buying any WordPress themes first take a look at whether the theme is SEO friendly or not.

If a WordPress theme is SEO friendly it basically means the theme is properly optimized for the following:

• HTML Markup: The HTML5 tags must be correctly used in your website to correctly highlight the most important parts of the blog content. For example, it will not make any sense if the H3 tag is placed before H1 or H2 tag.
  
  Having properly structured heading tags such as H1, H2, H3, etc. allows search engines to understand what the content is all about. A well-optimized theme will have these properly structured right out of the box.
• Page Size: Nowadays many premium theme developers try to keep their overall theme size below 500 KB. Why? Because nobody likes a slow website. A slow website ranks poorly on search engines.
• Mobile-responsive: Your website should display perfectly in all kinds of devices like desktop, mobile, or tablet. Nowadays, almost 60-70% of the traffic of a website comes from mobile. So it makes sense to use a mobile-responsive theme.
  
  Google now uses the mobile version of a website in its crawling, indexing, and ranking systems. So, it is another great reason to opt for an SEO friendly WordPress theme which is optimized for the mobile devices.
• Schema Markup: It helps search engine crawlers to provide rich information to your users even before they visit the website. All good SEO optimized themes have these which helps in improving the CTR (Click Through Rate) and conversion rate.

Please remember that there are hundreds of factors due to which a blog ranks higher on search engines. Among these many factors, SEO optimized WordPress theme are also one of the important factor. You would still need to work on other SEO factors like backlinks, on-page SEO, etc. Your website up-time and loading speed also play a crucial role in your ranking on Google. So, always use hosting from good web hosting providers.

Wrapping Up

Overall, an SEO friendly theme is a great way to ensure that your website is optimized for search engine optimization and reaches the maximum number of people.

By using an SEO friendly theme for your WordPress website, you can maximize your website’s visibility and help ensure that your website is successful.

If you think that there is any other SEO WordPress theme better than the one I have mentioned above, please share your thoughts in the comment section below.

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The WordPress theme behind this blog Technicalwall.com is GeneratePress. To learn more about this wonderful theme, check out the link below.