Hello, and today we will go over changing your WordPress theme without breaking your website. Changing your WordPress theme only takes a few moments. However, if you want to do it safely, switching themes becomes more involved. After all, your active theme is so ingrained into your site’s functionality that the change has the potential to break it. Therefore, the process of changing themes without introducing any new problems can take a bit longer than just clicking on the activate button.
However, if you follow five basic procedures, you can ensure that your site works smoothly after the switch. But before we get started, I wanna remind you to click the subscribe button, click the bell above to get the notifications and check out the video description below for more resources. Now this is the perfect moment to create a full backup of your WordPress website. Changing themes is a big deal so you want to be fully prepared in case you need to revert for any reason. Now let’s get started.
Step one, set up a staging copy of your website.
You can think about a staging environment as a lab where you get to do all of your testing and important changes to your site before the public gets to see any of it. 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 web host 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.
Since changing WordPress themes is such a delicate process, it doesn’t make sense to rush into it within your live site. With a staging website, you’ll be able to see what happens to your content after you switch themes, fix any mistakes and then push the result live when you’re ready. If your web host doesn’t offer staging functionality, you have other options you can try. For example, you can set up a local WordPress environment and create a copy of your website using one of your backups.
This approach isn’t quite as straightforward because you can’t deploy your local website online as easily as you can through your web host.
In that case, you need to create another copy of the site when you’re done making changes and upload it to your server afterward. If possible, we recommend using a web host that offers staging functionality. It can make your workflow much easier in a lot of situations so it’s a feature worth prioritizing. Step two, install your new theme and preview it.
At this point, your staging website should be up and ready to go. It’s now time to access it and install the new WordPress theme you want to use. Before you activate the theme, head to appearance, then customize within your dashboard. There you can make changes to your WordPress site’s appearance, and you can also use it to preview what your new theme will look like.
To do that, click on the change button next to the active theme section in the left-hand sidebar.
Then select the theme you want to test and click on the live preview button under its name. Afterward WordPress will display what your homepage 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. If you find any issues, you don’t need to worry about addressing them just yet. First, you’ll need to activate the new theme on your staging site.
Step three, activate your new theme. You already know what your website will look like once you switch themes so it’s time to get to work. Close the customizer and move to appearance, then the themes tab.
Click on the activate button for your new theme. Then you’ll see that your new theme is activated and ready to go.
It’s now live on your staging site which means it’s time to ensure that everything is working properly. Step four, resolve errors and replace missing elements. Depending on what features your last theme had, you’ll probably need to do some tidying up at this point. 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 part of your site including theme-specific widgets and shortcodes, your navigation bar and sidebar, specific sections within your pages, usually due to formatting issues or missing elements. Your content should all still be in place. Switching themes won’t affect that part of your site.
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. And while you’re at it, you’ll also want to make sure that you’re not missing any key functionality.
If your new theme doesn’t include some of the features your last one offered, you can always look for plugins that will help you replace them. If you’ve added schema markup to your pages which you should, remember that you’ll also need to configure your new theme to load it properly. However, if you’re using a plugin approach to handle schema markup instead of adding the data manually, you should be able to skip that task. Step five, push your staging website live.
Once you’ve made sure that your website is free of bugs and is looking just the way you want, it’s time to make it public.
If you played it safe by using a staging website as we suggested, that means you’ll need to push your staging site live. In other words, you’ll be replacing your existing live website with the new and improved staging copy. Keep in mind though, if you’ve been publishing new content on your live website while tweaking your new theme on its staging copy, that content will be overwritten 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. You’ll need to do a manual backup of your website and then upload it to your new server.
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. When you’re done, your live site will be ready to go with its new theme in place. It’s a good idea to do one more pass of its important pages and content to make sure that each element made the transition smoothly. Remember to go through these steps in order to avoid breaking your site. Set up a staging copy of your website.
Install your new theme and preview it. Activate your new theme. Resolve errors and replace missing elements.
Push your staging website live. A theme is very important, and most users tend to stick with the same WordPress theme for a long time.
Little things such as breadcrumbs and schema markup are things you don’t winna forget about because they can drastically change your site’s user experience and rankings if you suddenly change things around. Kinsta’s WordPress hosting can speed up your website by up to 200% and you’ll get 24/7 support from our expert WordPress engineers. Let us show you the Kinsta difference.
Try a free demo of our MyKinsta dashboard at demo.kinsta.com. Thanks for watching. Don’t forget to subscribe for more tutorials, explainers and helpful content like this.
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