How to change the theme on your WordPress site

This post will give you some tips on how to change the theme on your WordPress site, whether you are on self-hosting or on the free wordpress-dot-com plaftorm.

Starting with a tip

Working with a new theme can be a challenge, as you have to get to know how it works, understand the different options it gives you and what happens on the front-end when you change one of the settings behind the scenes. To play around with themes and not mess up your live sate when you change the theme, I suggest you create a test site:

Self-hosted:
Create a subdomain and install WordPress on it. If you don’t know how to do this, your host will be able to help you. Once you have the subdomain ready, in your dashboard go to ‘Settings’ — ‘Reading’ and click the box in front of ‘Discourage search engines from indexing this site’.

WordPress-dot-com:
Create a second free WordPress site and call it something like ‘MarieTestSite’ or anything that will be easy for you to remember. Once you have run through the steps to set up your site, in your dashboard go to ‘Settings’ — ‘Reading’ and at the heading ‘Site visibility’, click the option ‘I would like my site to be private, visible only to myself and users I choose’.

If you don’t want to play around with a theme on a test site, you can still follow the steps below in the dashboard of your live site, but be aware, when you click the ‘Activate and Publish’ button, the front end of your site will change.

Where do you find a theme?

We have already touched on this subject in the post Tips on choosing a theme for your site and elaborated on a tool you can use to discover what theme someone else is using on a self-hosted site, in the post What WordPress theme is that?.

There is another way to find a theme, and this works more or less the same in both self-hosted and dot-com sites:

Self-hosted:
In your WordPress dashboard, go to ‘Appearance’— ‘Themes’. You will now see the themes you already have installed, but since you want to install a new one, at the top, next to the heading ‘Themes’, click ‘Add New’.

WordPress will now show you the featured themes, but you can also click the headings to see the popular or latest themes. However, you can also use the ‘feature filter’ to search for themes. Whatever boxes you tick on the feature filter will return themes to you that match your criteria.

WordPress-dot-com:
In your WordPress dashboard, go to ‘Appearance’— ‘Themes’. You will immediately see the images of all trending themes. In the menu bar at the top, on the left you can change to ‘popular’ or ‘newest’ and on the right you can change to ‘all’, ‘free’ or ‘premium’. Mostly for a wordpress-dot-com site you will go for the free option.

Browse the themes. Look at the images. See if there’s something you like and would like to play around with.

Tip:
Sometimes it’s difficult to determine what a theme looks like once installed. Click on the details of the theme and find the web address to the demo version of the theme, or search the web for the theme. Just type the name of the theme followed by ‘WordPress theme’ and that will lead you to a demo of the theme, mostly on the theme author’s website.

Already have the name of the theme?

Let’s say you have already decided which theme you want to use. You have seen it on someone else’s site, or have done your research in the past, and now you just want to go ahead and change the theme.

Just like I explained in the previous section, in your WordPress dashboard you go to ‘Appearance’ — ‘Themes’.

Self-hosted:
Click ‘Add New’ and then in the next screen, in the search bar which says ‘search themes’, type the name of the theme you want to install.

Next, hover over the theme you have chosen, and click install. Once it is installed, do not click activate, unless you are working on your test site, then you can go ahead and activate the theme. If you are on your live site, first create a child theme, and then go on to the next section.

WordPress-dot-com:
In the search bar at the top where it says ‘search themes’, type the name of the theme you want to install.

When you hover over the image, you can choose to click ‘Activate’ or ‘Preview’. Click ‘preview’ when you are working in the dashboard of your live site, but when you are on your test site, you can go ahead and click ‘activate’.

Change the theme in live preview

Now it’s time to run through all the options of the theme, and change your site to suit your wishes.

Self-hosted:
There are a couple of ways to get to the live preview site:

• You have just installed your theme, and instead of clicking ‘Activate’, you have clicked ‘Live Preview’ (these are also the steps you take when you have created a child theme).
• You have installed the theme and are now coming back on another day to customize it. Your theme is not yet activated, so you hover over the theme in the list of installed themes and click ‘live preview’.
• Your theme has already been activated, and you now want to customize it. In your dashboard, go to ‘Appearance’ — ‘Customize’.

In the live preview screen, you have options in the left column, and see your site on the right. Each change you make on the left, you will see happening on the right.

Start at the top of the menu on the left, and work through every item on it. As you do so, make sure you click the arrow to go back to the previous menu, and not the blue ‘activate & publish’ button, especially not if you are working on your live site. Only once you are happy with what you see on the right side of your screen, you click ‘activate & publish’.

WordPress-dot-com:
There are a couple of ways to get to the live preview site:

• You have just searched for the theme, and instead of clicking ‘activate’, you have clicked ‘preview’.
• You have already activated the theme and are now coming back on another day to customize it. Go to ‘Appearance’ and either click ‘Customize’ under ‘Appearance’ or click the blue ‘Customize’ button on your theme.

In the live preview screen, you have options in the left column, and see your site on the right. Each change you make on the left, you will see happening on the right.

Start at the top of the menu on the left, and work through every item on it. As you do so, make sure you click the arrow to go back to the previous menu, and not the blue ‘activate & save’ button, especially not if you are working on your live site. Only once you are happy with what you see on the right side of your screen, you click ‘activate & save’.

Theme documentation

Most theme authors also have documentation to go with their themes. Unfortunately some don’t, and other’s documentation is so sparse, that you don’t get any wiser from reading it.

For themes used on self-hosted site, you might find a link to the documentation in the theme itself, and can follow that from the live preview screen.

Sometimes you have to go to the site of the theme author to find the documentation. Just type the the name of the theme you are using into your search engine, followed by ‘wordpress theme documentation’ and see what you can find.

If you run into problems trying to change the theme, just send me a message and I can try to help.

Image from Pixabay