- Rudy@websitefixerguy.com
How to Customize Your WordPress Theme in 2023
WordPress Themes and Customization
As a beginner with building a website, it’s crucial to customize the WordPress theme according to the website’s purpose and ensure that it has all the necessary features to run successfully.
For instance, if you plan on creating an eCommerce website, the first step after you purchase a domain and select a hosting service, it’s time to choose a theme that will accommodate your e-commerce niche.
Customizing WordPress themes may seem daunting, involving the use of tools, plugins, page builders, and even coding such as CSS. But with the right approach and a bit of patience, you can create a website with ease.
Think of themes as providing a frame for your portrait, but the actual design lies in the hands of the admins. In this article, I’ll guide you through the process of customizing a WordPress theme effortlessly and making your website stand out from the rest.
What is a WordPress Theme?
In essence, a WordPress theme is a set of pre-designed templates that collectively dictate the overall appearance of your website.
Themes can control everything from the header and footer to the layout and color scheme – with thousands of themes available, ranging from free to premium, covering various niches such as food blogs, eCommerce, fashion blogs, travel blogs, and more. A popular WordPress theme is GeneratePress, a an easy-to-use theme that has the tools to create anything, including a blog, portfolio, or an online (E-Commerce) store.
Why Customizing Your WordPress Theme is Essential
Customizing your WordPress theme can have a significant impact on your website’s appearance and help you showcase your unique style.
It can differentiate you from other websites, especially when top websites have a similar design approach. Customizing your WordPress theme can help you achieve a unique look that represents your brand.
Customizing your WordPress theme is more than just adding features or design elements; it helps promote your business.
However, some themes may have poor layouts, color schemes, optimization, or other factors that could degrade website performance.
Tips to Customize Your WordPress Theme
There a few ways to customize your WordPress theme, but the most effective method is the one that suits your comfort level. Here are two (2) common options:
- Make All of Your Changes in a Child’s Theme.
- Use the Default WordPress Customizer Tool
1. Make All of Your Changes in a Child’s Theme
The creation of a child’s theme is one of the best ways to prevent data loss during theme customization or updating for WordPress.
Before you begin customizing a WordPress theme, it’s best to create a child theme to make changes to it, rather than editing the parent theme file directly.
It is the best method for adding your unique codes or code snippets and preventing their deletion.
The reason why is because WordPress reads the archive.php file from the child theme rather than the parent theme even though the child theme file has exactly the same functions and features as the parent theme.
You won’t need to fiddle around with the theme’s files and codes if you use the default Customizer tool.
Editing/Customizing Third-Party WordPress Themes
If you have chosen a third-party WordPress plugin, instead of your theme, or installed it from the WordPress repository, you need to create a child theme to make edits or customizations.
Without a child theme, any changes you make to the parent theme will overwrite previous codes, and all previous data will be lost. Here are the steps to create a child theme:
- Access the wp-content folder and open the theme file using an FTP client.
- Create a new folder in the theme folder.
- In the new folder, create a stylesheet and provide information to WordPress that it is a child theme of the parent theme.
- Copy the files from the parent theme to the child theme that you want to customize.
- Activate your child theme on your website.
When you create a child theme and update the WordPress theme, WordPress will select the file with the higher order in the hierarchy list of the child theme instead of the files in the parent theme.
For example, if your parent theme has a category.php file, and you created a child theme with an archive.php file, WordPress will use the category.php file first from the parent theme.
However, if you intend to use tags, WordPress will use the archive.php file from the child theme instead of the parent theme since archive.php is in the second position on the hierarchy list.
2. Use the Default WordPress Customizer Tool
WordPress comes with a built-in Customizer tool that allows website administrators to customize their websites, based on the theme used. There is a vast selection of premium WordPress themes that offer an array of customization options, both free and paid versions.
If you choose to use the WordPress theme Customizer tool, you must first select a theme from WordPress to install and customize before diving into any coding and other technical stuff.
Return to your WordPress dashboard and from the left column, click Appearance > Themes > Select theme > Install > Customize from the menu options.
The WordPress customizer lets you customize the following features in a theme in general:
Website Identity Customization (Logo, Favicon, or Title)
A website’s logo, icon, and title, along with a tagline displaying the site’s mission statement, help to establish and promote a brand. Visit your site’s identity panel and click on it to reveal the various options.
Add a site title that appears at the top of your website’s homepage, your website’s logo, and, if applicable, a tagline. When you are done customizing, press the Publish button to store your changes.
Customize the Color of Your Website Theme
If the theme supports it, you can quickly find a Colors and Dark Mode option in the WordPress customizer panel.
There are some premium themes available that restrict users from extensive customization unless they purchased the paid version.
You can increase the custom options by selecting a theme that offers ‘Theme Options’ as one of the theme’s features. The level of customization is based on the theme you use.
Adding Menus
On your WordPress website, you can customize a variety of things. Some themes even let you customize and add navigational Menus to your website, depending on the theme you have installed.
It only takes a few clicks to choose the Menus option in your WordPress customizer panel. To edit or add new personalized menus, click on Appearance.
Explore Other WordPress Customization Options
Apart from the built-in customization options, some WordPress themes come with additional settings that offer even more customization options.
For instance, the 2021 WordPress default theme offers options such as widget management, homepage configuration, excerpt settings, and extra CSS. Whereas, the 2023 WordPress default theme scales it back for a minimalist design.
Once you have customized theme to your own satisfaction, save your changes by clicking the “Publish” button. You can now exit from the customizer tool, or continue customizing your theme.
- Enhance Theme Customization with Page Builders
While WordPress offers a decent range of customization tools and themes, it also provides options to use page builders and plugins that offer an even better user experience and make building websites easier.
- Use Free Plugins and Tools for WordPress Theme Customization
There are numerous free page builder plugins and tools available in the WordPress repositories that make customizing WordPress themes easier without requiring any coding knowledge.
These page builders let you design a professional website easily with their intuitive user interface and real-time preview feature.
- Use the Elementor Page Builder with WordPress themes
Due to its straightforward user interface, extensive customization options, add-on support, and drag-and-drop functionality, the page builder Elementor has become extremely popular and is used by many websites.
When compared to WordPress customizers, using page builders offers a wide range of customization options.
However, it’s crucial to pick the appropriate page builder for your requirements as some may only offer simple drag-and-drop functionality while others may offer more flexibility.
- Customizing WordPress Theme with Codes
To customize your WordPress theme with codes, you can access the “Theme Editor” link located below the background option in the Appearance section of your dashboard.
Clicking on the link opens a page displaying all the codes of the theme, including the style.css and functions.php files. If you have CSS or coding knowledge, you can make changes to the files using this editor.
Alternatively, you can use an FTP client ((such as File Zilla) to download and upload all the theme files from the web server. To do this, you need to connect your FTP client with your web server, access the theme files, download them, make changes to them, and upload the updated files through the FTP client.
If you are familiar with CSS and coding, you can edit your theme, which is specifically built for your website considering all the essential requirements.
However, if you are working on a theme that you are not familiar with, it is better to create a child theme and make changes to it instead of the parent theme file.
It is essential to exercise caution when editing theme files, especially if you lack CSS knowledge. Before making any changes, you need to understand the codes and their connection with the features of your website.
Using the FTP is a great way to add PDFs, e-books and/or checklists to your website as an offer or to sell to your email subscribers.
Understanding the Style.css File
The style.css file mainly contains all the codes for styling your website, including layouts, colors, icons, and fonts.
If you want to make changes to your website layout, you need to access your style.css file and edit the relevant codes.
Similarly, if you want to change the color theme of your website, you need to edit the relevant codes in your stylesheet.
However, you need to exercise caution while making changes to the style.css file, as not all the codes may be directly related to the feature you are trying to modify.
In some cases, certain functions or codes are part of other functions that are on the hierarchy of the same page.
To overcome this situation and find the exact element that affects CSS, you can use the “Inspect element” tool available in Chrome.
Right-click on the webpage and choose the “inspect” option. A new window with elements and codes will appear in the same tab located either at the side or bottom of the browser.
The 'Inspect Element' Tool for WordPress
The Inspect Element tool is a useful feature that can help you locate and target every element on a web page in WordPress. With this tool, you can edit or add CSS to specific elements to customize your website’s appearance.
Understanding the Functions.php File
The functions.php file is a crucial file in WordPress that is responsible for many essential features of your website, such as widgets, picture slides, and featured images.
When you want to add or edit functional codes, you need to access the functions.php file of your theme. However, it is recommended to write code for a plugin rather than adding two-liner codes to the function file.
It is also crucial to have a good knowledge of PHP to work with this file. Simply copying codes from the internet and pasting them into your function.php file can potentially damage your website.
What to Do When Unable to Customize a WordPress Theme
If you encounter issues while using the Customizer tool or are unable to customize your WordPress theme, here are the ways to resolve them.
Reinstall or Update Theme
To resolve issues with the WordPress customizer, it’s important to check for bugs or error codes in old versions of core files, themes, or plugins.
Update them as soon as possible if a newer version is available. Outdated versions aren’t always the main culprit, but security breaches or hacker attacks can also cause issues. Regularly check for updates for all the elements present on your WordPress site to avoid problems.
Conflict between Plugins
Plugin compatibility or conflicts between two plugin scripts can cause errors or issues. The more plugins you install, the greater the possibility of conflicts.
It’s best to eliminate all unnecessary plugins and only install those that are critical for your website. To find the culprit plugin, deactivate all plugins (rather than uninstalling them) and see if the WordPress Customizer works well.
Then activate each plugin one by one and check with the customizer. Once the customizer shows issues, you will have your culprit plugin.
After covering all plugins, and the issue remains, further investigation is necessary to ensure that the single plugin was not responsible for the other plugins as well.
Once you find out all possible culprits, immediately uninstall or delete them from your WordPress site. Alternatively, wait for an update or roll back to the previous version. This is a common occurrence when WordPress updates itself; plugins are then updated to continue working properly with the new WordPress version.
However, not all plugins update all at once, and you may find that a plugin doesn’t work properly. Give it a few hours up to a couple of days before it is updated.
You can alleviate this update delay by setting your plugins to automatically update. Note: Some paid versions, like Elementor Pro, GeneratePress and RankMath pro versions need to be updated separately.
Conclusion
Customizing a WordPress theme is simple, especially if you’re using the WordPress customizer tool. Whether you’re changing the website icon, adding navigation menus, changing the theme color, or adding a timeline, you can use the WordPress customizer tool, page builders, and plugins, edit WordPress theme files directly or create a child theme.
Choose the best suitable customization option for you based on accessibility and comfortability. Before making changes to theme files, create a child theme, make changes, activate it, run a test, and then push it to your live website.
Editing theme files without proper coding knowledge or skills can be risky and result in website damage or data loss. Instead, use the WordPress Customizer tool to edit themes, which is a safer option than modifying delicate theme files.
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