Themes matter for SEO. Sometimes it’s the Above The Fold algorithm affecting the site. Other times it’s HTML5 and rich snippets missing from the theme that could be holding your site back. Sometimes it’s just a very poorly coded theme where the content tags look more like widgets, and the footer looks more like the main content. We’ve changed themes and increased rankings multiple times.
Standards
Google raised the bar on what the standards of the web should be along with your competition. You can’t realistically use a theme from 2007 and rank well today. There are too many changes that happened not only with WordPress but the web itself to explain. A short list of the changes would be responsive design, HTML5, rich snippets and schema data, and CSS3 instead of image buttons.
Conversion
Never forget that conversion is what drives money home at the end of the day. If your theme isn’t converting you have to change it. Also remember that if it worked in 2008, it probably doesn’t work today. People today almost expect parallax design, mobile responsiveness, clean buttons, etc. They’ve been exposed to it so much that if you don’t match up – you’re the one left behind.
Evolve and adapt. Or die.
Frameworks
Amazing designers are usually creative types. Amazing WordPress designers are creative types who realize WordPress is great, so they edit the default 2012 theme to do what they want. Incredible WordPress designers use child themes on top of frameworks that are built to outlast many updates.
We used to be Thesis users. Thesis took years to catch up to the web standards. Version 2.0 was “coming soon” for so long that serious designers gave up and moved on. Thesis got left behind. We will not debate why they suck anymore. It was great for SEO years ago, but that time is long gone.
Genesis
Today, StudioPress’ Genesis is the most well-built framework on the market for rapid-built SEO sites.
Genesis has tons of options with plenty of plugins specific to the framework itself to provide just about anything you need. Genesis always uses child themes. If it’s your first time on Genesis, you will feel like you had to pay twice for a pre-made theme. It’s worth it.
Selecting a good child theme can take time. There are a handful of Genesis child theme developers who offer entire packs for downloading. Often, these packs contain PSDs for more customization if you want it.
Finally, for the more advanced DIY crowd there is a tool called Dynamik Website Builder. It puts you in full control of all the elements you could want to tweak and design within a child theme. If you are starting from scratch, we highly recommend learning with the “Sandbox” theme found here.
The best part about Genesis? You won’t even realize it: it doesn’t get hacked. It can automatically update itself without screwing up your design. It has its own control panel that’s easy to work with.
X Theme
We’ve noticed a few weaknesses in Genesis. You can’t do Parallax easily. Premise, the easiest landing page creator, is no longer publicly available. You can’t use the built-in WordPress customizer to move and edit fields. Genesis doesn’t seem to care about these issues, and that’s okay and there is a great reason why: editing a theme that does has a serious learning curve.
X Theme creates visually stunning sites that are well coded. They take advantage of Visual Composer (it’s included with the package) along with child themes, and the editing is literally live on the screen as you do it. It’s pretty incredible. You can move the menu from left, top, right, etc. You can do what you want.
You pretty much have to be a designer to use it. But from a coding perspective, it is amazing except for updates. Envato requires them to do updates through the website. They are working on a fix, and we suspect them to go independent as the theme is doing so well on its own. Another fix may be a plugin that syncs with Envato to allow updates automatically like Genesis.
X is awesome. Just be ready to spend many more hours designing and coding to get what you want. This is the DIY-perfectionist type framework. Michael was a designer earlier in his career; he will warn you to only try X framework in if you are good at Photoshop and have hours to spend on a design.
We will never use X theme for feeders; only Genesis. This is simply because X takes way too long to customize.
Warnings
Avoid OptimizePress, almost every theme on Envato, Thesis, etc. We’ve been hacked and left behind enough to know that all of these are terrible options. While X is on Envato (Themeforest), it is a diamond in the rough.
Best Practice
We love to look at all available child themes and hack them into what we need. Even this site is using the simple “Agency” theme from StudioPress. We took an angled picture from an iPhone to use as the background, and altered the green to match our shade. It took less than 3 hours to get it built along with all of our “icons” to make navigation easier.
“I don’t want my client’s site to look like a template” – it typically won’t. Modify your stock photography or take your own. Use Google fonts and the 100e2r standard. Or just use Dynamik or Sandbox and build it that way.
When we design, we tend to like full-width default settings. Everything starts to feel like a landing page. This works for us but it may not for you, depending on the needs of the project.