How To Change My Wordpress Blog Theme
How to Change Your WordPress Theme Without Breaking Your Site
Do you want to learn how to change your WordPress theme? Giving your site a face-lift is a great way to inject vitality into a site that's grown dull and stale.
But it can be scary too. What if something breaks, and you don't know how to recover everything you worked so hard to build?
So if you're asking, "can I change my WordPress theme without losing content?" there's no need to worry. Today we'll look at how to change your WordPress theme without breaking your site. That way, you'll have a great new look, without the worry of things going wrong.
- What Is a WordPress Theme?
- What to Do Before Changing Your WordPress Theme
- Choosing and Installing Your WordPress Theme
- How to Change Your WordPress Theme Without Going Live
- How to Change Your WordPress Theme on a Live Site
- How to Change Your WordPress Theme from Cpanel (Manually)
- What to Do After Changing Your WordPress Theme
- How to Change Your WordPress Theme: FAQ
What Is a WordPress Theme?
A WordPress theme is the visual design of your website. Many people also refer to WordPress themes as templates and sometimes even skins. But the main purpose of a WordPress theme is to determine how your website looks.
Most website owners stick with the same WordPress theme for a long time, and it's not something you want to change frequently. That's because the look and feel of your WordPress site represent your brand. So if you change your 'branding' too often, people won't find it familiar anymore.
Moreover, many themes include specific design elements. And as a result of changing your theme, you'll lose your theme's special features too.
That said, most website owners will change their WordPress theme at some point. They do that to give their site a fresh design or to add some new features. So if that's your goal, you'll need to ensure you don't lose any content when you switch.
What to Do Before Changing Your WordPress Theme
Learning how to change your WordPress theme without losing content is no small task. While your new, shiny theme might be a few clicks away, there's still plenty to take care of before making the switch.
Work through this checklist before changing old WordPress themes out for a new one. That way, everything should go smoothly with less chance you'll lose content or break your site.
1. Copy and Save Custom Code Snippets
If you've had the same WordPress theme for a while, you may have customized certain theme areas with your own code. These changes are easy to overlook once they've been made.
If you've had to modify your WordPress theme in the past, it's important to go through the theme's folders and note the changes down. That way, you can add them to your new WordPress theme at a later time.
Not doing that means your new theme won't have any custom changes because the new active theme replaces all the old theme files.
That's why if you want to add code snippets to your site, we recommend creating a site-specific plugin instead of editing your WordPress theme files directly. As such, any code you add won't be affected if you switch themes.
2. Check Your Load Times
One of the next things to do before changing your WordPress theme is to check your website's loading time. This makes it easy to compare your old theme speed with the new one.
Your WordPress site's speed is an important factor for SEO and the browsing experience of your site visitors. Having a new theme that's slower than your previous one could make your visitor's experience worse, as well as your search rankings.
You can use this free WordPress speed test tool to check your website speed. Make sure you check some of your inner pages, as well as your homepage, for a better idea of overall performance.
3. Save Your Tracking Codes
When it comes to your tracking codes for analytics, some people add these directly into their WordPress theme files. Many themes also have a special theme options area for saving tracking codes.
Before changing your WordPress theme, copy and paste these codes into a notepad. When you've switched themes, you can add them back into your new PHP functions file.
To save yourself the hassle of doing this every time, we recommend using a good WordPress plugin like MonsterInsights for installing Google Analytics. And, for any other tracking code, the header and footer plugin is another good choice.
You can read our MonsterInsights review here.
The tracking code in these plugins won't be affected if you change themes, so you won't risk losing data.
4. Backup Your Website
It's always a smart choice to backup your site and wp content before changing your current theme or when you migrate your site. Make sure you back up your:
- Posts
- Pages
- Images
- Plugins
- Database
- Contact Forms
- WordPress Users
This is so that if your new theme causes any issues, you have a full backup to restore your website.
A good way to do this is to use a WordPress backup plugin to backup your entire site.
Make sure you download your backup to your computer before moving forward with installing your new theme. Your backup is then easily accessible should things go wrong.
5. Save Your Sidebar Content
Sidebars are a great place to display important information such as:
- Subscription forms
- Social media links
- Advertisements
- Giveaways
But, they're easily overlooked when changing your WordPress theme. While WordPress will save your widgets, the layout may change depending on your theme.
That's why it's a good idea to make a note of your sidebar layout before switching, including any custom HTML, CSS, theme-specific shortcodes, and advertising codes. Then save them to your computer.
Once you've switched to your new theme, you can easily add your code back in if needed and make sure your widgets display as they were before.
6. Enable Maintenance Mode
If you're not using a staging site, it's always worth getting into the habit of putting your site into maintenance mode when making changes behind the scenes. You don't want visitors to see a site that's clearly under construction.
We suggest using the SeedProd plugin for this purpose.
SeedProd is the best landing page builder for WordPress. It makes it easy to create high-converting landing pages without needing any design experience.
The visual drag and drop page builder is super-easy to use and includes everything you need to design stunning WordPress pages in minutes.
Even better, the SeeProd page builder plugin comes with built-in coming soon, 404, login page, and maintenance mode pages that you can turn on and off with a single click. Not to mention, it offers WooCommerce support for eCommerce websites.
To put your site into maintenance mode, get started with SeedProd here. Then install and activate the plugin. If you need help with this step, follow this tutorial for installing a WordPress plugin.
Now from your WordPress dashboard, click the SeedProd icon to view the SeedProd overview.
At the top of this page, you'll see the option to set up a Maintenance Mode page. Here's a step-by-step tutorial on how to put your WordPress site into maintenance mode.
After that, it's simply a case of clicking the Maintenance Mode toggle and turning it from inactive to active.
Choosing and Installing Your WordPress Theme
After working through the above steps to prevent breaking your site, the next step is to install your new theme.
You might be considering using free themes. While this is a good choice for small, personal websites, they lack many of the features you'd need. Instead, it's a good idea to look for a premium theme.
If you're still undecided, we highly recommend the following WordPress themes and plugins:
1. Divi
The Divi plugin is a hugely popular WordPress Theme powered by the powerful drag and drop Divi Builder. It easily allows you to build any kind of website.
Divi comes with over 20 pre-built layouts and has 46 different elements for displaying your content. You can customize each element to suit your needs, and the changes can be seen in real-time.
Related:
- Elementor vs Divi vs SeedProd: Which Page Builder Wins?
2. Astra
Astra is a super lightweight theme that's optimized for speed. It works with several popular page builder plugins like SeedProd, so you can build your website in any way you prefer.
This theme is also translation and right-to-left (RTL) ready. This means your website can be any language you'd like. You can even go multilingual if your visitors use different languages.
Astra is easy to integrate with the WooCommerce plugin, meaning you can turn your site into an online store. What's more, you can customize many elements using the WordPress Theme Customizer.
3. StudioPress
Genesis is one of the most popular theme frameworks for WordPress and was built by the StudioPress team. Alongside their minimalist child themes, you can create stunning websites using Genesis.
StudioPress is also part of WP Engine, the most popular managed WordPress hosting company. And, if you sign up for a WP Engine web host plan, you'll get over 35 StudioPress themes for free.
4. OceanWP
OceanWP is a WordPress theme that's both responsive and multi-purpose. It has a large selection of demo templates built with a variety of businesses and professions in mind.
What's more, it's compatible with major page builder plugins. Add to this a range of extensions, and you can take your site even further.
5. SeedProd
As we've already mentioned, SeedProd is a plugin that you can use to customize any landing page on your WordPress website. It lets you build gorgeous pages for your site without the need to know any coding.
Best of all, it has a growing library of landing page templates to get you up and running quickly, including templates for:
- 404 error pages
- Thank you pages
- Webinar landing pages
- Maintenance mode pages
- Coming Soon landing pages
- Sales pages
- Squeeze landing pages
- WordPress video pages
SeedProd works with almost any WordPress theme without breaking your site. You can even use it to create custom landing pages that match your existing WordPress theme without taking a course on learning to code. Its drag and drop builder makes the customization process effortless.
Hopefully, you've managed to choose a theme that will work well for your website with these recommendations.
The next step is to add new themes to WordPress. You can do this in a few ways:
- Downloading your theme directly from the theme provider and uploading it to your site.
- Searching for your theme using the WordPress theme search option.
For help getting set up, check out this beginner's guide on installing a WordPress theme.
How to Change Your WordPress Theme Without Going Live
With your WordPress theme installed, it's now time to switch your WordPress theme to your new look.
But before you go live, it's important to test the new theme. This is so you can ensure it works well alongside your existing plugins and iron out any compatibility issues.
Let's take a look at 3 ways to test your WordPress theme before going live.
1. Use the Live Preview Option
WordPress has a nifty default option that lets you preview changes made to your site without publishing them.
To do this, go to Appearance » Themes from the left-hand sidebar of your admin panel. You'll then see a list of your currently installed themes.
Hover your mouse cursor over the theme you want to preview, then click the Live Preview button.
This opens your theme in the WordPress Theme Customizer.
Here you can test all areas of your site and view them as if they were live, all without breaking your site and committing to any changes.
2. Use the Theme Switcha Plugin
Another option for previewing and testing your WordPress theme before going live is to use the Theme Switcha Plugin. This lets you preview your new theme without going live with the changes.
First, download, install and activate the free plugin. Then go to Settings » Theme Switcha from the left-hand sidebar of your admin panel.
From the general settings page, select the Enable Theme Switching option. Then scroll down to the bottom of the page and click Save Changes.
At the bottom of the page, the plugin will now display all your installed themes. Click your new theme to preview it in a new browser tab.
3. Clone Your Site to a Staging Environment
Many WordPress hosting companies now have the option to clone a copy of your website onto a special staging environment so you can test out changes before publishing them.
Here's an example of creating a staging environment using Bluehost. From your admin panel, select Bluehost » Staging. This will bring up a page that asks if you'd like to copy your production (live) site to a staging site.
Click Create Staging Site to begin making the clone.
After a short while, you'll see a page with a success message, telling you your staging environment is ready to work on.
Click Go to Staging Site to go to this version of your website.
You can now test that your theme works properly without any changes affecting your site's original version.
We'll discuss how to publish the changes next.
Note: Some hosting plans don't offer staging sites unless you use an advanced plan.
How to Change Your WordPress Theme on a Live Site
Now that you've successfully added your new theme zip file and tested it on your staging environment, you're ready to make it live.
To publish your new theme, the easiest way is to go to Appearance » Themes from the left-hand sidebar of your admin panel. Now hover your mouse cursor over your chosen theme, and click the Activate button.
Now, if you head to your homepage, you'll see your new WordPress theme in action.
To publish your new theme from a staging environment, follow these steps.
Go to Bluehost » Staging Site" and scroll a little way down the page from your staging environment. You'll see 3 options for copying your test site over to your original, live site.
- Deploy files only.
- Deploy files and database.
- Deploy database only.
In most cases, you should choose the Deploy Files and Database option since it will include any changes you've made to your site.
It may take a minute or 2 for the information to copy over. You'll see a success message when the process is complete.
Once that's done, navigate back to your main (production) site, where your new theme will be in action.
Some people prefer using an older method of changing their WordPress theme using File Transfer Protocol (FTP client) to upload files to WordPress. Others prefer to configure themes via their WordPress host's cPanel.
Check this beginner's guide on using FTP to learn how to upload themes on your web hosting with FTP.
How to Change Your WordPress Theme from Cpanel (Manually)
If you prefer to use the older method mentioned above, it will largely depend on which hosting provider you use. Different hosts have different interfaces, so you'll need to look at your host's documentation for the exact steps.
That said, here's how to change your WordPress from your Bluehost Cpanel.
First, log in to your Bluehost hosting dashboard and click the Advanced heading in the left-hand sidebar.
From there, scroll down to the Databases section and click on the phpMyAdmin icon.
Next, choose the database your WordPress site is using. Then, click the + icon next to your username to expand if you do not see a list of databases in the sidebar on the left.
To set a new theme, select the wp_options table. It might be called something different for your database.
Once loaded, check Show All box. Now, scroll down until you find the template and stylesheet settings. Click Edit on each option.
In the option_value setting, replace the current theme with the name of the theme you want to use. In our example, we're changing to the Twenty Twenty WordPress theme.
Click Go to save when you are finished. Once updated, your WordPress site and Admin Dashboard should be accessible.
What to Do After Changing Your WordPress Theme
It's easy to think that the work is over after changing your WordPress theme, and you can sit back and relax. The truth is, there are still a few things to handle to get the best experience for your site visitors.
Use the following checklist to ensure a smooth experience after changing your theme.
1. Check Your Website Works Properly
Even though you've tested your new WordPress theme before launching, it's easy for a few glitches to make their way through.
Take some time to thoroughly check your:
- Plugins
- Widgets
- Posts
- Comment sections, and
- Forms
Ensure they're working as they should to prevent vital elements of your site from breaking.
2. Check Your Website in All Browsers
Next, check your website in different web browsers. Some browsers tend to display things differently than others.
Checking your site for cross-browser compatibility is important for consistency. An inconsistent experience for your site visitors can seem unprofessional.
3. Add Tracking Codes and Snippets
Remember the tracking codes and code snippets you saved before changing your WordPress theme? Well, now it's time to add them back into your new theme.
MonsterInsights is a great choice for adding your Google Analytics tracking code. It lets you properly set up analytics and allows you to view important statistics from within your WordPress dashboard.
4. Disable Maintenance Mode
To allow your site visitors to see your new theme, you can go ahead and disable maintenance mode.
If you're using the SeedProd plugin, click the SeedProd icon from your WordPress dashboard to view your landing page overview.
Then turn the Maintenance Mode toggle from the active position to inactive.
5. Test Your Page Loading Times
Lastly, check the page loading times of your homepage after changing your WordPress theme. Head back to the WordPress speed test tool and test the same pages as before.
Compare your old theme's page speeds to those of your new one.
If you don't see any improvements in your site speed, you can follow this simple guide to improve WordPress speed.
Great work! You now have a site that looks much better than it used to. You've also learned how to change your WordPress theme without breaking your site!
How to Change Your WordPress Theme: FAQ
If I change WordPress themes, do I lose my content?
When you change your WordPress theme, you won't lose any website content. Switching themes only changes your website's design and functionality, so your content will still be intact. That said, you should always back up your content before changing anything to be extra safe.
Which theme is best for WordPress?
The best WordPress theme for your site depends on the type of features and design you need. To help you choose, here's a list of the best WordPress themes for small business websites.
Should I delete unused WordPress themes?
Yes. It's a good idea to delete any WordPress themes that you don't use. If you have lots of themes installed, it gives hackers more opportunities to access your website.
We hope you found this guide on changing themes super useful. And if you'd like to refresh your plugins as well as your theme without breaking the bank, you might like this guide on the best free WordPress plugins.
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How To Change My Wordpress Blog Theme
Source: https://www.seedprod.com/how-to-change-your-wordpress-theme/
Posted by: hernandezouldives.blogspot.com
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