How to Prevent SEO from Getting Lost With New Theme

Changing themes requires no skills. Just click on a new one. Themes should not affect anything but the presentation of existing content. They don’t change URLs or generate content (not supposed to anyway).

This developer guy wants to charge me thousands of dollars and tells me it will take all month. He does have an amazing reputation, but I am wondering what he will be doing in that 30 days. Like what will he be doing in that time to optimize all my pages and not lose SEO.

Why would you think SEO is that impacted by a theme change? if at all?

Changing the content (optimizing for SEO) is totally different than switching themes.
Perhaps keep the items to work on separate? And get a detailed list of actions to be taken before starting?

Yeah, I have no idea, honestly. I have a lot of SEO strength and have talked to a few developers and asked if SEO will be lost. Some say no one can guarantee it won’t be lost, while others say it won’t be lost.

And when someone says it takes a month to work on the project, I just want to know, from a developer who has done these sort of projects, what occurs in that timeframe. What is actually worked on, besides switching over the theme?

You did say

My site needs a massive overhaul. I have over 1,700 articles and the current layout does not support my new objectives: use the blog to drive people to my store.

So it sounds to me like you would be rearranging and perhaps rewriting content. I could be mistaken about your goal. This will affect SEO. It involves changing some page addresses (and redirecting old ones). You have to lay out the organization of the new, and then make the old arranged like that.

But if you have a lot of SEO strength right now, why change it? Just keep doing what you’re doing. It is my opinion that content should be handled only by the expert in the topic, which means store owner or service provider or whatever. Not by someone hired to do SEO, because their knowledge is search engines. The content gets skewed when it’s artificially manipulated for search.

Try going into your admin panel, go to Customizer, and click Change at the top to preview another theme. It will show you the themes you have installed and you can select www.remarpro.com on the left to see other themes. When you click a theme, it will download to your site and then you can see how your site looks with that theme. Most themes have options, but I’m not remembering right now if you can try the options or not. If you find one you like, just keep it, and that part is done.