How To Change Theme On Wordpress Blog

You can change the theme of your site as often as you like. This guide explains how to switch themes and make sure your site looks just the way you like.

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How to Switch Themes

To change the theme of your site, follow these steps:

Go to Appearance → Themes. You will see your site's current theme at the top.
Browse through the available themes and choose one that you like.
Click the three dots icon and select Activate.
Decide if you would like to add demo content or not.
Set up your theme according to its instructions.

When you switch themes, all your existing content carries over. Nothing is deleted, so it's perfectly safe to switch (and you can always switch back to your old theme if you change your mind.)

A theme called Barnsbury is shown, with the three dots button clicked and the option to Activate is highlighted.

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Preview a Theme Before Switching

When browsing themes, click the … (three dots) and choose the Live demo option to view an example of a site with the theme applied:

To Preview a theme, click Live Demo from the options next to the theme name.

When viewing the demo site, click Try & Customize at the top of the window to open the theme in the Customizer with your site's content loaded. You will see how your site can look in this theme without changing how your site looks to your visitors. You can change the settings to test drive how the new theme will look with your content.

In the Live Demo of the theme, you can Activate it on the top right, close it on the top left, or Preview it in different modes from the dropdown.

If you're happy to move forward with the theme, click Activate & Publish. If not, click the X to exit without activating the theme on your site.

When using the Try & Customize feature, you can activate the theme from the Customizer's Activate & Publish button at the top.

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After Switching Themes

When you change to a new theme, there are a few things you should check afterward:

Homepage

Is the correct homepage assigned? Go to Appearance → Customize → Homepage Settings to make sure the correct page is set as the homepage. You can then go to Pages and click your homepage to edit the content.

You'll want to check your menus to make sure they're showing up in the correct locations and that they look how you want.

Widgets

You'll want to place your widgets in the proper widget locations. Like menus, each theme supports different locations.

Custom CSS

The only thing that would not transfer over with your theme is Custom CSS, because that is theme-specific. However, you can recover your past CSS in the CSS history link located at Appearance → Customize → Additional CSS.

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Return to a Previous Theme

It's ok to change your mind. If you activate a theme and later decide you want to restore how your site looked before, all you need to do is reactivate the previous theme you had on your site. If you're not sure which theme you used to have, go to Jetpack → Activity Log to see a record of recent actions taken on your site: