What search engines read
With Aether → Settings → Advanced → Structured data on (it is, by default), each page carries a description of itself for search engines:
- Your organisation — name, logo, social profiles and contact details — and your site.
- The breadcrumb the page banner shows, where it shows one.
- Every price grid, as a service with its plans and their prices, read from your products.
- The questions of any FAQ widget set to FAQ rich results, merged into one list per page.
- A description of the page: its excerpt, or the tagline on the home page and the blog. A post without an excerpt uses its first lines; a page without one gets none, and search engines write their own.
Give each page an excerpt in its Excerpt box: it is also the sentence under the page in the menu and in its banner.
With an SEO plugin
When Yoast SEO, Rank Math, All in One SEO, SEOPress or The SEO Framework is active, the theme leaves the organisation, the breadcrumb and the descriptions to that plugin, and adds only what the plugin cannot know about: your plans and your questions. Nothing is described twice. The line under the switch says which plugin it found.
Faster pages
- Host your fonts. In Aether → Settings → Typography, set Where the fonts come from to This site. Pages then load their fonts from your own server instead of asking Google first, and appear sooner — on a phone especially.
- Ask your host for compression and caching. Gzip or Brotli compression and browser caching are set on the server, not in a theme; most hosts and every CDN offer them.
- Use a page cache plugin. Aether's forms keep working behind one.
Aether ships its stylesheets and scripts minified, loads the design-system styles only on pages that use them, and keeps WooCommerce's shop styles off the pages that are not part of the shop. jQuery and WooCommerce's order-attribution scripts are loaded by WooCommerce and Elementor, not by the theme.
Accessibility
Aether is built to the WCAG 2.1 AA level:
- text contrast of at least 4.5 to 1, in light and dark sections;
- a Skip to content link, and a visible focus outline on everything you can reach with the keyboard;
- the menus, the mega menu panels and the phone menu work with the keyboard, and Escape closes them;
- no sideways scrolling, down to a 320-pixel-wide screen;
- animations are left out for visitors who ask their device to reduce motion.
The colours you choose are yours to check: a pale primary colour behind white text can fall below that contrast.