7 Things to Do Before Changing Your WordPress Theme - Glowist Gujarat

Every website owner is required to change the theme of their website from time to time. You might want to replace an existing theme with a lighter one to reduce load time, add better customization options, or change the look of your site.

The process of changing the WordPress theme on your site is straightforward, but there are a few prerequisites you need to meet beforehand to make sure you don't mess up a live site and we have compileds list of things you should do befores changing your WordPress theme.

1. Backup your WordPress site

Your top prioritys should be to do a full backup of your website first and when you back up your content and database or you'll have a replica of the current state of your site. If things don't go as planned when changing your theme, you can always use a backup to restore your site without losing important changes.

Although most users perform daily or weekly automatic backups, it is essential to create a new backup and store it in the cloud or on your computer to avoid losing the changes made after the backup. There are a number of plugins available for backing up your website, but UpdraftPlus makes it easy.

2. Put your website on maintenance to inform your visitors

Changing a WordPress theme on a live site can be disastrous. Instead of disrupting the user experience of your website visitors by displaying a distorted web page with content, images, headers and footers, add a maintenance message.

You can give your site maintenance in different ways so it looks like changes are being made behind the scenes. You can either write your own code, use plugins, or use third-party page builders. Using a plugin is the easiest option as it allows you to activate and deactivate maintenance mode with just a few clicks.

Bloggers generally recommend using the SeedProd plugin to get your site up and running, but you can use any of the free plugins in the WordPress library.

3. Copy the code snippets

You may have used some custom code snippets to extend the functionality of your WordPress theme. Depending on how you added them, you need to avoid losing them when changing themes. If you manually added them to your theme file, you'll need to copy them all over before making any changes.

If you use a dedicated plugin to add snippets, it may or may not preserve those snippets or apply them to the new theme. In any case, it's better to copy any custom code you've added to your theme or plugin file and save it offline. If something goes wrong, you can still use the same code snippet to customize the new theme.

4. Notice the customization of your theme

You should also take careful note of the placement of various elements in your theme, including widgets, header elements, footer elements, custom text, and more. Consequently, if a WordPress theme change returns all such customizations to their defaults, you can replicate them manually. Later

It is also necessary to check the feasibility of adapting to a new theme. Analyze how customizable its fonts and layouts are, how easy it is to use with the page builder, and how easily you can customize it with code snippets. So make sure it offers the same level of customization as your old theme so you can redesign it to your liking.

5. Take note of your site's speed metrics

It is necessary to perform live speed and performance tests of your old theme in the current state of your website. After changing the theme, you can repeat the test and compare the performance of your site on the new theme with the old theme. So if a theme overloaded your site instead of improving your site's load time, you can revert the change.

GTmetrix is ​​an excellent website performance analysis tool. Run a performance test and note the performance score and site structure along with the site's critical points. If you've used code snippets on multiple pages, you can also view the performance overview for each page to make sure that adding code snippets to the same pages in a new theme doesn't overload it.

This will help analyze how the new theme handles existing snippets. You can also use other WordPress speed test tools to check website performance.

6. Check theme compatibility on different devices

Your website visitors access your website from different devices. Therefore, it is essential to have a theme that is responsive and compatible with all devices. WordPress themes normally work perfectly on desktop but there are issues on mobile.


Check if the theme you plan to use is designed to be mobile-friendly, or assess how much effort you'll need to put into creating a mobile-friendly theme.