Theme Selection

Previously, I showed how to apply a different theme and how to set its attributes to give it a different color scheme and add graphics. But each theme defines its own limits of what you can customize. If you have a vision of what you want, it helps to find a theme that’s fairly close, and test whether you can customize it in the way you need.

I can’t tell you what to choose, but I have some hints on how to search, and a list of a few good themes.

Some themes come with built-in functionality you would otherwise need a plugin for, such as contact forms, special widgets, sliders, and so on. If you happen to find a theme with special features you want, that’s fine, but don’t spend a lot of time searching for just the right combination of features. Focus on the overall layout and scrolling behavior. If it lacks other abilities, you can usually add those with plugins.

When you try a new theme, first deactivate Hide featured image… plugin to see whether you need it with that theme.

Theme Test Page

My setup program created a page named “Theme Styling Test,” and a menu item to get to it. It contains examples of block quotes, headings, and bulleted and numbered lists so you can see how the theme displays those.

If you don’t like the way a theme displays things, and you know some CSS, you can use custom rules to make adjustments. The most frequent problem is with list formatting, so if your numbered and bulleted lists aren’t right, I’ve come up with specific CSS rules you can copy and paste to correct them.

Look Around for Websites You Like

There are many WordPress websites, so when you see a website you like, take a closer look to see whether it was done with WordPress and if so, what theme they used.

Sometimes this information is displayed at the bottom of the page. If not, use the website scanwp.net, where you can enter a URL and it’ll tell you what theme a WordPress site uses. It’ll also list any plugins it can identify.

People sometimes make their own theme by building a “child theme” on top of another theme. You can use your browser’s “view source” function and search for occurrences of “wp-content/themes” on the page, to see if they are all followed by the same theme identifier (like the name but not exactly the name). If not, one corresponds to the original theme and the others are its “children.”

In addition to the theme features, you can also often use “view source” to identify what plugins are in use on the site. Search for “/wp-content/plugins/” — everything that follows that is the name of a plugin (approximately).

Searching the Free Themes

Before starting to try out new themes on your website, use your backup plugin (Settings > Updraftplus Backups in your dashboard) to make a full backup of your site.

• Open Customize and find the theme name near the top of the menu. Click the Change button beside the theme name.

• Select WordPress.org themes.

You saw this screen before when activating the Twenty Sixteen theme. This time, you might not know what theme you want by name, but try searching for words in the descriptions. There’s also a Filter themes button to limit the results based on attributes the developers claim the theme has (not always accurately).

• Click a theme to see details. Sometimes you can find a demo of a theme on the developer’s website. This would show off their features better than the screenshot in the dialog does, and may explain some of the options.
• Click the Install & Preview button to view your own content with that theme.

The preview occurs in the Customize screen, so you can try all the options without affecting what website visitors see. Not every option is necessarily in Customize (some might be in the dashboard), but the better themes make all or most of their stuff available there. Some things to try:

• Visit your Theme Styling Test page to see whether you like the way the text is formatted in lists and paragraphs. (You might have to add the page to the menu temporarily so you have a way to get there while in Customize).
• Use the screen size controls at the bottom of the Customize menu to test the theme’s appearance on phone and tablet. This isn’t as good as the browser’s responsive testing mode, but that’s not usable while in Customize.
• Make notes of your observations. SCIENCE!
• If you decide to keep this theme, at least for a while, click the Save & Activate button.

This will use the new theme for all website visitors. Remember, you can always switch back to your previous theme (you might have to put your widget areas back in order – see next section).

If you decide this theme isn’t the one you want, return to the themes screen in Customize and keep looking. You installed it, so a copy is left on your site, and you may eventually want to clean up the rejects for tidiness. To remove unused themes, look in the “Installed themes” section of the Customize Themes screen. Click a theme to open a dialog with its description, and find the “Delete” link in the lower left corner.

• Once a theme is activated, visit the dashboard’s Appearance > Theme Settings screen to look for options that weren’t available through Customize.

There may be disabled options you can’t use unless you upgrade to a paid version of the theme. But features can also be added with free plugins, so don’t be in too big a hurry to pay.

A Few Good Themes

Here are a few themes I think are all right. As described above, to install them, use Customize, click the Change button after the current theme name, select WordPress.org themes, and search for by name.

• Neve by Themeisle: My current favorite. It gives good control of typography and spacing of paragraphs and headings (a lot of themes have too-small text for meeting accessibility requirements and no way to change it except by writing custom CSS rules). There’s also a header and footer section in customize that lets you add multiple rows of various types of elements (button, snippet of text, site title, etc) with full control of styling and color and ability to specify what goes where on mobile vs. desktop.
• Graphene by Graphene Themes Solutions: My previous favorite. This is professional, reasonably customizable, and has some nice features like a built-in posts slider, sticky menu, and automatic display of a child page navigator in the sidebar.
• Evolve by romik84: This is a theme with a modern look and functions, including posts displayed as thumbnails, infinite scroll, and sliders. You can find plugins to do many of these things, but it’s nice to get support in the theme when you can.
• Miteri by ThemeEgg: Not unlike Twenty Sixteen, but with a more stylish look, less wasted screen space, a few more options, and a masonry layout for blog entries, which is nice if you use a lot of photos in your posts. Note: recent WordPress versions have added more options for blog layouts in the base code, so it’s no longer as important to have a theme that handles this well. There are also a bunch of nice plugins to display posts in different ways.
• Author Pro, based on the “Genesis” function set, is not free (so it’s not available by searching in Customize), but is specifically designed for author websites. Some people like it; I think the book-listing functions it includes are not best of class, so I use a different theme with a book catalog plugin.

Restoring Widgets for a New Theme

When you switch themes, the widget areas in the new theme might not have the same names as the old one. WordPress tries to guess which widget areas your existing widgets should go into, but it might guess wrong. If it can’t find a good place for them, WordPress moves them into an inactive widgets list, preserving any customizations you made to titles and so on.

We’ve already seen how to work with widgets in the Customize function. But if some widgets have been inactivated by the theme switch, they don’t show in Customize. Use the Appearance > Widgets screen of the dashboard (not Customize) to find inactive widgets and drag them to a widget area.

In this example, there’s an entire inactive sidebar left over from an old theme, plus inactive widgets not associated with a particular sidebar (I collapsed the Available Widgets list to show these without scrolling).

• If there are old widgets you still want to use in the new theme, drag them into place on one of the theme’s widget areas on the right side of the screen.

In this example the widget areas are Sidebar Right and Footer Widgets. Your theme probably has different ones.

There’s no Save button for dragging widgets around; the change takes effect immediately.

However, if you edit the contents of an individual widget (e.g. change its title), you must save that widget.

Disable Unneeded Plugins

• Check whether your new theme includes functions previously supplied by plugins, and delete those plugins.

Your new theme might include functions you previously installed plugins to handle. If so (and if you’re happy with the way the theme performs those functions) disable and eventually uninstall those plugins. Some likely areas of duplication:

• If the theme has a way to exempt pages from search results, the Search Exclude plugin isn’t needed.
• If the theme supports a Social Links menu, create one and see where it displays, then decide whether to use that or continue to use the follow links supplied by Social Icons by WPZOOM or Sassy Social Share.
• Is there a built-in contact form, and do you like it better than the WPForms contact screen?
• Are there built-in share buttons, and are they as good as the Sassy Social Share plugins?