Simple & Minimalist Blogger Template for Fast Loading and Good SEO - 2021

What are Blogger Templates ?

Blogger templates are the easiest way to make your site / blog look more appealing and user friendly. There are lot of default templates provided by blogger itself. On top of that, there are tons of free and paid themes and templates available to you just by a simple google search. However, if you have used such theme in past, you may have realized that these 3rd party custom templates come with a lot of overhead which include tons for dependencies such as external JavaScript from CDNs and heavy fonts.

These overheads drops your blogger loading and rendering performance significantly which results in bad scores of Core Web Vital features. Most of the time you doesn't need these fancy fonts and external script because all End User wants is good content and less distractions.

Why to use this Light and SEO Optimized theme ?

Overcome the above issues of slow speed and lot of unnecessary gadgets on my site I decided to to make a new blogger template which is both good looking and fast. But when I started working on it from scratch it felt like reinventing the wheel. That's why I choose a minimalist theme already provided by blogger named Essential and modify it to fit my needs.

In order to make this theme light and use as less resource as possible, I have removed many things. I removed the sidebar and used the space below header to provide basic navigation. Secondly, unnecessary JavaScript and CSS bundle provided by Blogger is removed. I also disabled comments on posts and pages because it is mostly used by spammers to advertise their site.

Default blogger Essential theme provides only one Subscribe button on top which is to be used for subscribing through email. I modify this widget and added two buttons which will link to my other social media accounts. I added custom styling for links which made it look like button, alert boxes for four type, code boxes and tables. Custom tags are added for search engine optimization and open graph protocol.

Features of this Light and SEO Optimized Blogger theme

This free blogger template / theme has following features in its version 1.0.0. (release in January, 2021)

Feature	Availability
Complete Responsive Design	✔️
Completely Free	✔️
SEO Optimized	✔️
Fast Loading	✔️
Various type of Alert Boxes	✔️
Code Box	✔️
Custom Button / Anchor Tags	✔️
Custom Cookies Message	✔️
In-Article Ads	✔️
In-Feed Ads through Adsense	✔️
Further Customization through Blogger Designer	✔️
No obfucated JavaScript	✔️

How to setup this Theme?

Theme Features Download Template

Setting up this template is quite simple as it uses a blogger provided theme to extend it's functionality. All you have to do is download the xml template file using the link given above and restore your blog using that xml file.

Make sure you make a 'Backup' of your current theme before trying this one one. This is a good preventive measure, just in case this new theme doesn't works out for your site / blog.