Changing to another theme?

· 1 min read

When you change your theme your pages, posts and categories will all not be affected by that at all. However, anything that you’ve setup under the Appearance menu might be gone!

After changing theme you may have to re-assign your menus to the new theme’s menu locations under Appearance > Menu.

You may need to setup your widgets again under Appearance > Widgets.

What I like to do is drag the Widgets out of the Widget Areas before I switch theme, so they are in the “Inactive widgets” area, from there I can easily restore them to the new theme’s Widget Areas. Some themes are able to move the widgets over for you, but more often they are all just gone!

Anything you did under Appearance > Customize will need to be done again, this can include uploading your logo and header images.

Be sure to have a good backup before making any big changes to your site!

The new theme doesn’t look like the thumbnail!

This is most likely how it’s supposed to look. The demo of the theme already has a header image set and some content added etc. while the installed theme on your site is still “blank” so you can configure it the way you want.

Some themes allow you to import demo data to make it look just like their demo version, most themes would have a detailed manual available on how to setup the theme.

While importing demo data (if at all possible) can help to show you all the features of the theme it can also quickly become messy when you have to delete and replace all the demo content with your own. Some themes allow you to quickly import a lot of demo content but have no way to quickly delete all of the demo content later on so that can turn out to be a nuance.