Theme Breakdown
The Theme Breakdown groups your latest audit’s findings by theme — the systemic pattern behind individual issues — and shows a count for each. Instead of scrolling a flat list of N issues, you see the handful of underlying causes driving them and how many findings each one accounts for. It’s the template-vs-page lens raised to the dashboard level: it tells you what to fix first, not just what’s wrong.
What you’ll need
Section titled “What you’ll need”- A completed audit run. The breakdown always reflects your latest crawl, so re-run the audit if you want the themes to reflect recent changes.
- Access to Site Audit → Themes.
- A rough sense of your site’s templates (product page, blog post, category), since a high-count theme usually traces back to one shared layout.
What you’ll see
Section titled “What you’ll see”Each row is a theme with a count of how many findings it explains. Common themes include:
| Theme | What it usually means |
|---|---|
| Canonical problems | A template emits the wrong canonical, repeated across every page using it. |
| Missing structured data | A page family ships without the schema its content type calls for. |
| Render-parity gaps | Content or metadata that exists raw but disappears after JavaScript runs, or vice versa. |
| Crawlability blocks | robots.txt, internal-link, or depth issues keeping pages out of reach. |
A high count next to a single theme is the signal that matters. It almost always means one template-wide defect is generating many page-level findings — fix the template once and the whole count clears.
How to use it
Section titled “How to use it”Triage by root cause, not page by page. Start with the highest-count theme: it represents the largest blast radius for the least work, because a single template change resolves every finding underneath it. Work down the list from there, and treat low-count themes — genuine one-off page problems — as the last pass.
When you open a theme, you’re looking at the same findings you’d see in the Issues view, just organized by their shared cause. The fix is the same; the breakdown only changes the order in which you approach it.
Next steps
Section titled “Next steps”- Template-level vs. page-level issues — the scope concept the breakdown is built on
- Audit History — confirm a theme’s count dropped after you fixed it
- Reading your audit results — severity, confidence, scope, and evidence on each finding