How long wordpress theme

But unfortunately there can be a lot of complications and gotchas. Then it is essential to create a development site where you can try out new themes and troubleshoot any issues. A development site will allow you to compare the old site to the new, which makes is much easier to spot display errors and conflicts. You want your theme to last as long as possible, and to be kept up-to-date with the latest WordPress security patches and code fixes.

Choosing a native WordPress theme like twentyseventeen is always a safe bet. The WooCommerce Storefront theme and its many child theme variants are also solid choices. The good thing about twentyseventeen or Storefront is that these are very basic themes that are easier to customize to match your branding. There is no substitute for spending time with a professional design and marketing expert to identify your specific business needs and how to use your website to meet your goals.

Once the design phase is done, a talented development team will build your custom theme to bring the design to life as a fully custom website. Parallax backgrounds, animations, advanced menus, feature boxes, and sliders are all time-consuming to implement, so if you want these features, look for a theme that already has them baked in.

But do make sure the theme is from a trusted developer. You also want to ensure your theme will be compatible with necessary plugins e. If you are not sure which theme to upgrade to, try out our handy WordPress theme quiz. One of the biggest problems with migrating to a new theme is the use of custom theme settings to create the homepage, sidebars, and other structural elements.

This may cause the homepage content or sidebars to disappear entirely when a new theme is activated. The slider, Google Analytics tracking, and some SEO settings may also be stored in the theme and need to be migrated. Your old theme may have had custom post types, shortcodes, or widgets that disappear when you switched themes, so these will need to be re-created, either manually in functions.

With a staging copy of your website, you can make any changes you want without fear. If you break something, you can easily start over without any repercussions. These days, a lot of WordPress hosting platforms offer you staging functionality as a part of their packages. Here at Kinsta, for example, you can set up a staging environment with just a couple of clicks:. For example, you can set up a local WordPress environment , and create a copy of your website using one of your backups.

If possible, we recommend using a web host that offers staging functionality. At this point, your staging website should be up and ready to go. To do that, click on the Change button next to the Active theme section in the left-hand sidebar:. Afterward, WordPress will display what your home page will look like once you activate the new theme. Take a moment now to go over your entire website within the Customizer, and make a note of any obvious problem areas or bugs.

Then, click on the Activate button for your new theme:. WordPress may take a moment to process the change. Is your WordPress site taking ages to load? Check out our plans. In our experience, this is the step that takes the longest amount of time. How intensive it ends up being will wholly depend on how the switch affected your website. As we mentioned before, changing themes often breaks parts of your site , including:.

What you need to do now is get to work on customizing your new WordPress theme , until your website looks just the way you want it to. It often only takes a couple of clicks to get the job done :. So before you push your staging website live, make sure you move all of the new content over to the staging site. If you tested out your new theme on a local WordPress installation instead, this process will take a bit longer. It can be a bit of a hassle to do this, but not nearly as much as dealing with a broken website if you decide not to use a staging copy.

A theme is very important and most users tend to stick with the same WordPress theme for a long time. On this page, you will have to scroll down to the Databases section and then click on phpMyAdmin.

Simply click on the database that you are using for your WordPress site. Now you need to locate the template and stylesheet rows on the right panel.

After making changes to both the rows, you can go to your website to see the new theme in action. First, you need to make sure that all the functionalities, plugins, and widgets are working properly. You should invest some time to test your website and check out different things including the posts, comment section, images, and the contact form.

To make sure that your website looks good in every major browser, you should test your site in different web browsers including Google Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Internet Explorer. You can use the MonsterInsights plugin to add the Google Analytics tracking code.

This will allow you to properly setup analytics and view detailed website stats right inside your WordPress dashboard. You need to go to the Pingdom website again to test the loading time of your homepage after changing the theme. Next, compare it to the load time when your old theme was installed. If you see any major differences, you can follow our guide to improve WordPress speed. If your new theme is not user-friendly and difficult to navigate, it may increase the bounce rate of your site.

You can add related posts, popular posts widget, and breadcrumbs to reduce the bounce rate and increase page views. You can also ask your users for feedback and suggestions on how to improve your site design. You can use survey forms or online poll to gather user input. You can share the new design with your subscribers using an email marketing service and ask them for their suggestions.

This will help you to get ideas on what they would like to see improved. We hope this step by step guide helped you easily change your WordPress theme. You may want to see our list of the must-have WordPress plugins for business websites. If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for more WordPress video tutorials. You can also follow us on Twitter and Facebook. Trusted by over 1. Hi regarding 3.

Would the same instructions be followed if I were to switch to the same exact theme? Is there a way to only switch the license information or would I need to follow the given instructions? In that case, you would want to check with the support for the specific theme and they will let you know if any changes would affect your site or any steps you should take. My website was done by a web developer agency.

The theme they made has no update functions. Is this normal? Just written is the author who are the developer but no clickable link to take me anywhere. I am new to wordpress and bought a theme but its title is on my page instead of MY title to my page. Any help very much appreciated. This tutorial is for WordPress. Is there any way to switch themes without losing customisation?

I want to try a new theme not just preview it, but if I decide to finally use the first one, will it keep my customisation when I activated again? Its a great article. Thanks for sharing your recommendation. Glad our guide was helpful. Thanks for choosing to leave a comment. Please keep in mind that all comments are moderated according to our comment policy , and your email address will NOT be published.

Please Do NOT use keywords in the name field. Let's have a personal and meaningful conversation. Don't subscribe All Replies to my comments Notify me of followup comments via e-mail. You can also subscribe without commenting.