It’s fun to change WordPress theme. It may refresh your site, improve user experience, and align your online presence with your business identity.
However, moving WordPress themes might be scary since you may lose your customized settings and functionality.
Luckily, there are ways to streamline this move. With thorough solutions, this post will help you migrate how to change WordPress themes without losing content.
1. Backup Your Website: Ensuring Data Security
WordPress isn’t flawless. Before making a major WordPress theme change, back it up. If something goes wrong while changing the theme, you can restore your website’s content, database, media files, and settings from a backup.
How to Back Up Your Website for Change WordPress Theme
Use a Backup Plugin
Using backup plugins to protect your WordPress website is smart. WordPress backup plugins like UpdraftPlus, BackupBuddy, and Duplicator offer unique functionalities to meet your backup needs.
The approach is simple: install, and activate your preferred backup plugin. After the initial stages, carefully follow the setup instructions, and create a complete website backup. Automated backup scheduling is a major benefit of these plugins.
Manual Backup
For hands-on website security management, manual backup is an option. It takes more time and effort, but it gives you unmatched backup control. You can carefully download all of your website’s files using a reliable FTP application or hosting management panel.
Consider learning how to export your important WordPress database using phpMyAdmin or similar tools. This phase may lengthen the backup process, but it allows for more flexibility and supervision.
2. Use a Staging Site: Test Before Implementing
A staging site lets you test and change WordPress themes without affecting your live website. It’s a great place to test WordPress theme changes and configurations before installing them on your main site.
Setting Up a Staging Site Before Change WordPress Theme
Hosting Provider Staging
Optimizing your workflow typically requires using hosting provider tools and services. In this scenario, staging capabilities offered by some hosting providers can simplify website management.
A good first step is to ask your hosting provider about this beneficial service. A simple question can reveal if your hosting package supports staging. Don’t hesitate to ask your provider additional questions. After all, you are the customer.
If your hosting service has this tool, you must understand its benefits for website management. Your hosting provider will likely provide instructions for constructing a staging site after confirmation.
Staging Plugins
Staging WordPress plugins fill the gap when your hosting provider doesn’t offer staging. These dynamic plugins let you easily construct staging sites regardless of your hosting configuration. WP Staging, All-in-One WP Migration, and Duplicator are popular plugins.
Using these plugins, you can clone your site. The staging site lets you test new features, make modifications, and fix bugs before launching your website to production. The staging site typically has different subdomain, for example:
https://staging.yourdomain.com
3. Use a Theme Switching Plugin: Graceful Transition
Use a theme-switching plugin to change WordPress theme smoothly. These plugins let you examine new themes while retaining your existing theme for visitors. Thus, you can adjust the new theme at your leisure before launching it.
Using a Theme Switching Plugin
Install and Activate
Installing and activating a trusted theme-switching plugin prepares your website for seamless experimentation. This crucial step opens up new visual avenues. Search the vast theme-switcher plugin pool for reliable plugins in this domain.
Front-runners include “Theme Switcha“.
After finding the right plugin, quickly install it on your website. The activation thrusts open many options in order to change WordPress theme.
Preview Themes
Now that the plugin is seamlessly incorporated into your website’s foundation, theme research is exciting. Visiting the plugin’s settings reveals many options.
In this digital sandbox, you can carefully choose your WordPress theme. You can preview WordPress theme changes with a click. The Preview Themes phase goes beyond aesthetics. It provides a complete picture of your website’s design future.
Customize
A new theme offers a chance to customize, not simply for looks. With the theme as a canvas, you can be creative with its specifics.
The customizing step lets you create personalized transformations that reflect your tastes. Refinement guides your exploration of layouts, fonts, color palettes, and other design details.
Most theme-switching plugins simplify customization without confusion.
Go Live
As you customize your new WordPress theme, a crucial decision approaches: revealing your beautifully prepared change. After navigating modification to your satisfaction, start the seamless transfer from preview to reality.
This planning prevents your valued guests from being disrupted during the unveiling. Ultimately, it boosts your website’s appeal and user experience. Don’t disrupt the experience of your users!
4. Use a Child Theme: Protecting Customization
Child themes are useful for keeping customizations when changing WordPress themes. A child theme lets you customize its parent theme’s functionality and style without impacting its core files.
Creating and Using a Child Theme
Create the Child Theme
Manual orchestration is one way to create a child theme that reflects the website design’s aesthetic expression.
Create a new directory in the themes folder to house your child theme’s essence. This special place will showcase your website’s distinctive features.
In this area, a carefully prepared style.css file brings the child theme to life. This crucial document references the parent theme, and contains a precisely defined structure. Among other things, the file contains the reference to the parent theme:
Template: parent-theme-slugCustomize the Child Theme
The WordPress ecosystem, always thinking of its users, simplifies child theme creation. Avant-garde plugins like the Child Theme Configurator bridge aim and implementation. This modern method reduces errors and saves time that could be better spent on personalized creativity.
When the child theme appears, personalization begins; when you activate the child theme, its wings open, providing necessary upgrades to the parent theme.
Switch to the Child Theme
In the child theme paradigm, customizations are separated from the parent theme’s base. This border protects your art from parent theme modifications. Your website retains its character when the parent theme upgrades.
The transition to the child theme is smooth with your customizations. The time has come to reveal your creation and confidently switch to the child theme. The beauty is that your website’s style, functionality, and attitude remain consistent regardless of the parent theme.
5. Content Backup and Migration Plugins: Ensuring Consistency
Several plugins let you migrate material between WordPress sites or while changing themes. These plugins help preserve content, layouts, and settings throughout the transition.
Plugins for Content Backup and Migration
All-in-One WP Migration
In times of inevitable and rewarding WordPress theme changes, the All-in-One WP Migration plugin is invaluable. This adaptable tool connects your site to your desired topic horizon.
Its strength is its broad approach—it covers your entire digital world. Intricate database and rich tapestry of media assets, plugins, and themes that make up your website’s identity—this plugin cares for every aspect. The All-in-One WP Migration plugin is simple but powerful: export and import.
Duplicate Post
The Duplicate Post plugin is adaptable beyond its intended use. Although not designed as a migration plugin, its features are essential for WordPress theme changes. This plugin becomes a digital artisan who can precisely copy sites and articles.
The appeal of Duplicate Post is its capacity to revive your prior work. It replicates your intricate content tapestry for a smooth transition to your new theme. This is effective for retaining complex content structures. The plugin’s simple mechanics let you reproduce gracefully.
Widget Importer & Exporter
The melody of your layout is widgets. Like a conductor, the Widget Importer & Exporter plugin guides theme transitions in this orchestration.
Dynamic widgets shape your site’s visual and functional personality, and are crucial. This plugin preserves Widgets when changing WordPress theme.
The Widget Importer & Exporter plugin enhances design fidelity. It lets you export widget configurations from your theme, capturing their essence and layouts.
Conclusion
Changing WordPress themes improves your website’s appearance and functionality. With proper planning, you can change WordPress themes without losing your content or customizations.
Use reliable plugins to back up your website, staging environments for risk-free testing, theme-switching plugins for a smooth transition, child themes to protect customizations, and content backup and migration plugins for consistency.
Following these approaches, you may confidently refresh your website’s look while preserving your hard-earned content, giving visitors a seamless experience.
