So… You’ve just finished installing a new theme in WordPress. Hopefully one of our premium WordPress themes. You’ve uploaded it into your wp-content directory, or installed it directly via the Appearance menu in your admin panel.
Congratulations! Now what?
Especially after using a theme long enough, switching themes might feel like a very hard thing to do. It’s no easy task, I’ll give you that; but if both the old theme and your new theme is well-coded, you’ve got very little to worry about. In this article, I’m going to walk you through the steps you need to take after installing a new WordPress theme.
But first things first: Back your website up! Here’s how to do that with plugins.
Check Your New Theme’s Options
First off, you need to get close with your new theme. In order to see what your new theme can offer you, there’s no better way than navigating through the options panel pages, and working your imagination. How does this option work? How can this setting benefit my website? These are the questions you need to ask.
(Side-note: If you need some customization that you can’t do with your new theme’s options, consider creating a child theme.)
Some themes, including our themes, have an option to create a demo website (just like the one you reviewed before buying the theme) with a single click. With a click of a button, you can fill your website with all the demo pages that you saw, and start playing with them to see how they’re constructed and how you can make similar pages.
Clean Up Your Old Theme’s Shortcodes
Sadly, your new theme probably won’t display your old theme’s shortcodes correctly. (Not necessarily though. For example; if both your old theme and your new theme has the Visual Composer plugin bundled, you’ll see that your content will display beautifully with the new theme.)
If that’s the case, if you need to remove the shortcodes because they don’t work, you have three options:
- Hunt them down and clean ’em all one by one, manually.
- Remove them in bulk with a search-replace plugin. (If you’re familiar with “regular expressions”, this will be the easiest option.)
- Hide them with another plugin.
So, go ahead and clean up all your old shortcodes.
PS: Most themes offer their shortcodes as a standalone plugin so the theme doesn’t invade the “plugin territory”. If that’s the case with your old theme as well, you may be able to use the shortcodes with little or no customization in your new theme.
Check Plugin/Theme Conflicts
Code conflicts naturally, and different developers’ codes conflict definitely.
Even though there are countless standards, APIs and “best practices” that WordPress developers need to (or have to) follow, sometimes plugins clash with other plugins, or themes clash with plugins, or plugins clash with themes. Luckily, the dark ages are almost over and developers don’t write conflicting code.
But in case that happens, or has already happened, you might want to check your website from the top (header) to the bottom (footer), from the back(end) to the front(end). If you don’t see anything unusual, great. But if you see something strange, you’ll need to clean it up or seek help.
Wrapping Everything Up
Well… It wasn’t that hard, what do you say?
I hope you enjoyed this walkthrough. If you really liked it, consider sharing it with your friends. And as always, feel free to shoot your thoughts to us in the Comments section below.
Thanks for reading!