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Did I just destroy my site’s SEO?
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That is scary. Didn’t you create a backup? Probably your previous theme was a better optimized theme suited to your business.
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There probably is some bloat. I would never use a theme and a page builder together. The page builder is the theme. Elementor is a plugin, so you technically have to have a theme installed, but I would just have a bare bones theme with the minimum code needed to function.
Elementor is not a great page builder for performance.
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I changed my wp theme last year and this happened to me (fortuna theme +.wpbakery). All content the same, navigation, internal links etc. It took a few months but eventually recovered. I kept posting new content in the meantime which probably helped.
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Curious why you changed your theme?
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I’d stay away from WordPress and the bloat entirely.
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Generally, you can do a revert to the old site and will see a faster return to rankings/positioning if there is an unknown issue occurring.
Even with careful migrations of content and other SEO factors, template and theme changes on sites can still have dramatic impacts on positioning. Google’s talked about that in the past.
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If you dropped 4-7 positions, it doesnt sound like the end of the world. See if you can find a version of the old site and do a HTML level comparison.
It looks like you’ve altered some dynamics of your site but its not a wholescale drop – sounds like some solid supporting posts and external links could just fix it – its not like you fell 50 pages.
I feel like people either blame Google updates and would have been cycling up or down, or were doing the things that Google wnated thme to stop doing and a 4-7 position drop on a priority keyword doesnt sound like it either.
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Either the recent algorithm update has impacted you or the change in the theme and altering of the codebase has just caused a reaction which would hopefully mitigate once your site has been crawled some more. How’s your Search Console data looking?
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FYI all the people saying it’s site performance- it isn’t. Pagespeed is a last mile ranking factor. The content on your website #1 along with being technically sound. Remember a slow site with great content will always outrank a fast site with poor content.
Edit: And backlinks also
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Hope you like the new theme hahahahahahahaha
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Does anyone here uses Astra as a Theme? Does it affect the SEO of the website?
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Check the cached version of your money pages from Google (you can see it by clicking on the three dots next to the SERP). Does that look like how it’s expected to look? if not, Google might not be reading the content properly so even though you didn’t change anything, they might not see it.
Also check search console for IMPRESSIONS for the terms you’re concerned about. Chance interest dropped depending on niche.
While you’re in search console, do a fetch and render of these pages, check to see if there’s anything wrong.
Lastly, pagespeed isn’t a MAJOR metric, but depending on the stuff that got worse, it can have an outsized impact, particularly for sites in competitive niches. If your competitors all offer similar content, a drop from good to average for performance could be impacting it.
Specifically, run the page through pagespeed insights and look at your Cumulative Layout Shift and Largest Contentful paint. If those are substantially worse, you’re hitting user experience which could mean impacts from the page experience update, ESPECIALLY if your competitors are all close to where you were before.
But lastly, even if the content and URLS stayed the same, you did change the look and feel a lot. Google’s gotta figure out where your page fits again. Any migration you make has an impact. Even long term positive ones can cause short term dips
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GTmetrix is not a good representation of the sites problem
use webpagetest / use pagespeed insights
if you dropped from A to C on GTMetrix on DESKTOP then something is terribly wrong
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Is there still a reason to use Elementor with WordPress after Gutenberg? What can it do that better (light, fast, properly coded) block builders can’t do? It stood out to me in your post and, personally, I never touch sites built with it; lots of issues.
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