There are many WordPress Themes that are advertised as SEO friendly or SEO optimized, but very few actually are search engine optimized themes. I’ve spent almost a decade working with WordPress and almost as long developing WordPress SEO themes.
To date (June 2014) I haven’t reviewed a WordPress theme (not developed by yours truly :-)) that was search engine optimized anywhere near the standard of my SEO themes.
I’ve been that confident in my WP themes I’ve offered up to $5,000 for the first person who finds a WordPress theme that offers all the SEO features of the themes I develop plus one more SEO feature.
No one has come close to claiming a cash prize.
So you think a WordPress SEO Theme is better than my latest WordPress SEO package, why not add your WordPress SEO theme Review below and I’ll explain why you are wrong.
WordPress SEO Themes I Develop
Talian 5.5 available for free on this website, some of the WordPress code and SEO features are a bit out of date.
Talian lacks mobile responsive design options and performance improving features, but is still better SEO wise than many WordPress SEO themes and it’s free.
Talian was the starting point for my next theme Stallion WordPress SEO…
Stallion WordPress SEO ThemeStallion SEO Theme version 7.1.1 the second best WordPress SEO theme available.
Awesome SEO theme with search engine optimization features never before seen in a WordPress theme (or SEO plugin), but lacks mobile responsive features which is increasing important to Google SEO rankings.
Which is why I used Stallion WordPress SEO as the starting point for Stallion Responsive (released early 2014).
Stallion Responsive version 8.0 the Best WordPress SEO theme available today (2014) by a light year: there’s at least a dozen SEO features no other WordPress theme or WordPress SEO plugin uses, totally unique SEO to Stallion.
Awesome SEO theme includes 95% of Stallion WordPress SEO (removed a few dated features), includes mobile responsive design and advanced Google SEO performance features (built in caching of Gravatars and Widgets for example).
So many SEO options and features it would take many hours to explain what Stallion Responsive can achieve to an experienced SEO expert.
Free Stallion Responsive Demo and Child theme with thousands of header and thumbnail images available on the website.
The website you are on now is powered by Stallion Responsive.
What about WordPress Theme and WordPress SEO Plugin Combinations?
Feel free to compare my WordPress SEO themes (would love to see comparisons between Stallion Responsive and popular themes and SEO plugins) to any other WordPress Theme + SEO Plugin combination.
Think the Thesis Theme + Yoast WordPress SEO plugin is better than Stallion Responsive, tell me why?
Think Genesis Theme + All In One SEO Pack Plugin rocks, tell me why?
Come on, worst case scenario you might learn something about search engine optimization, but if you can show why your WordPress SEO package is better than Stallion Responsive there’s $5,000 waiting got be claimed.
David Law
Website - SEO Gold
Joomla SEO Theme
Hi, David
In fact, I have never used Joomla before for blogging. But right now, I just received my other domain and I designed it with Joomla. Of course, it’s tough to do it. I really wonder if I can use your theme with Joomla or not.
Thank you
WordPress Theme
It’s a WordPress theme so only works with WordPress.
David
Genesis Theme Review
Hi, I prefer others. Genesis theme has me enthusiastic at this moment. Good post
Genesis Theme SEO
Dear David
I currently use a genesis framework with child theme for my blog.
I stumbled across your site and wondered: does your 500 -dollar package replace the genesis theme completely and outperform it significantly?
I use a rather large amount of plugins including yoast SEO and video SEO and others…..will they work with you package?
And last question…do you offer a service that would switch my site over to your theme and make sure everything performs at top performance? If so how much would it cost to have you do the work… I use the synthesis hosting service
Bo Kauffmann
Genesis Theme SEO
Genesis Theme Performance SEO
Yes the Stallion Responsive SEO Package replaces the Genesis theme framework and has a much better performance SEO metric.
Stallion Responsive like Genesis is a theme framework (a WordPress Theme). On a WordPress site you can only activate one WordPress Theme, so if you activate Genesis you can’t activate Stallion Responsive as well and conversely if you activate Stallion Responsive you can’t activate Genesis as well.
WordPress plugins are different, unless a plugin has been developed specifically for a particular theme it should work with any theme. If you have Genesis only plugins they probably won’t work with Stallion Responsive, but others should.
Every WordPress plugin is unique, so some will work better with particular themes, impossible to say all your plugins will work as you expect with Stallion Responsive.
The Yoast WordPress SEO plugin for example has a few features that interfere with Stallion SEO features related to the Stallion SEO Super Comments feature (turns your comments into Google entry points = more traffic). I’ve incorporated the Yoast SEO data into Stallion Responsive, so your Yoast title tags and meta descriptions etc… work with Stallion Responsive without using Yoast, depending on how you use Yoast (I’ve not added the plugin to the package, just used the same database names for SEO data so Stallion uses Yoast data) you might be able to drop it.
Stallion actually use the Yoast SEO data for more than just the title tags, so switching to Stallion Responsive means better SEO from the Yoast SEO data than using Yoast with Genesis (or any theme for that matter). In the process of incorporating even more Yoast data into Stallion Responsive 8.2 (next update).
The Genesis Theme Framework generates some really nice looking WordPress sites with nice features, BUT has practically no performance measures (or SEO features for that matter) as is shown by your websites Google PageSpeed Insights Results : http://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fblog.winnipeghomefinder.com%2F&tab=mobile
Mobile Speed 36/100
User Experience 99/100
Desktop 46/100
Those are really bad performance results, when I ran it it lists Server Response Time at 1.3 seconds, that’s awful, you will be loosing visitors and Google rankings due to that lag if it’s like that most of the time especially on mobile devices.
The Yoast site (develops the Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin) results which also uses Genesis isn’t much better: http://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fyoast.com%2F
My site running Stallion Responsive http://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fstallion-theme.co.uk%2F significantly better, almost maxed out without turning features off.
Look at your “Eliminate render-blocking JavaScript and CSS in above-the-fold content” issues, you have 20 files that are either render-blocking or not asynchronous loaded!!! It’s even worse on your posts, you have 43 files that are either render blocking or not loaded asynchronously!!! I think that’s the worst I’ve ever seen on a site!
Looking through your head code (top of your code that loads various resources) it’s 233 lines of code, that’s huge!
Looks like it’s a case of you’ve worked on the principle you find a nice feature and add it without considering performance at all.
You’ll note my website is relatively clean, every feature is analysed for it’s performance hit relative to how important a feature is. For example do I add a nice flashy image slider feature that research has shown visitors tend to ignore at the cost of adding huge jquery scripts to run it (like you have on your site)? I’ve gone with no, not worth the performance hit.
The Stallion Responsive SEO Package includes a lot of performance SEO measures, but if you run the package with dozens of flashy features it will pull your performance down. Analyse every feature and decide how important it is and if it’s worth the SEO hit. For example you have three ways to post comments, do you need 3 ways? You have 5 ways to Google+ 1 an article, do you need 5?
I don’t have a performance SEO service, I offer free support for the SEO package via the comments here.
Can I suggest setting up a test site and trying the SEO package for free in demo mode. Download Stallion Responsive and run in Demo mode to test the full package, the main options reset every 1,000 pageviews giving time to try it out. Will give you a very good idea if the SEO package is for you.
David
Genesis Theme Performance SEO