Customising a WordPress theme is very complex and sometimes requires a lot of coding knowledge. This is because they are very easy to break, and that is the last thing that you want on a live website. This is why many people would get a creative agency, because they would have web developers who specialise in designing websites and customising existing themes.
That being said, if you have experience with WordPress, you should trust yourself. Let’s take a look at how you can customise a WordPress theme with very little coding experience. Continue reading to find out more.
Understanding The Issues
Before you dive headfirst into customising your theme due to the excitement, you need some knowledge of the risks you could encounter. After all, the theme is deeply embedded in the code of your website. Some of those issues include:
- Break Core Features: Editing a theme can actually break the important aspects of your website, such as contact forms, search bars, and even navigation bars. This could mean using them to look broken, or how they look visually.
- Shortcodes and Widgets: Another issue that can occur is breaking plugins and widgets. These can be detrimental to your website, so breaking these can affect its functionality.
- Affect Schema Code: Schema is essentially for both the user’s experience and the performance of SEO, which is essential for traffic.
Be Cautious
Now that we have discussed the potential issues that could occur, hopefully, something has triggered that makes you want to be more cautious. So, let’s take you through the next steps of how you can be cautious and ensure that if anything goes wrong, it is easily rectifiable.
Create Backups
Creating a backup of your website before you make any changes is a priority. A full backup will ensure you can fix your website if you do break it.
Use Staging Environments
This is definitely something you should be doing if you want to reduce the risks of downtime on your website. If you are unsure what this is, this is where you will work on a copy of your website, which is essentially treated as a testing environment.
When working on your website in the staging environment, you can try anything you like because you know it won’t break the website. Customising the theme to improve the user’s experience. You can then also identify any issues that it may cause. Furthermore, these changes can affect the HTML and PHP code, so it is certainly worth testing in a theme.
Previewing and Testing
Before you apply any of your theme customisations, you should ensure that it is tested in the staging environment. Furthermore, there are a lot of WordPress themes which offer a preview version of your changes, so this is something to consider.
When it comes to testing, you don’t just want to rely on your own knowledge. Get friends and family to help with the testing, as they can try something that might not be necessarily something you would have tried yourself.
Create Step-by-Step Changes
Another thing that is recommended is that when you do make changes, consider an incremental approach. Making little changes one step at a time and implementing them is another way to mitigate potential errors. Plus, it is much easier to determine what has caused an error when you take this step-by-step approach. Site logo, header and navigation menu, homepage layout, colour scheme and typography, design of other pages, footer and widget areas, custom post type sitemaps. All of these features should be changed separately and not all at once to help reduce errors.
Tools To Help Customise Your Website
One of the benefits of WordPress and why it is so popular is that it offers many tools to customise your website. This includes both built-in tools and third-party tools. Some are very advanced, and others are great for beginners.
WordPress Customizer Tool
Using a WordPress customizer tool can actually help with a lot of the changes you wish to make. This includes everything we mentioned above, such as logo, page design, navigation menu, etc. This tool also allows you to make real-time changes, and you get to see a live preview. Not to mention that you can experiment here without permanent changes.
Third Party Tools
Something else that is worth considering is third–party tools for your customisation. This includes Brizy, SeedProd, Beaver Builder and Elementor. These are the most popular amongst website builders.
Summary
Customising a WordPress theme can be quite nerve-racking. That being said, there are ways around it to ensure that you don’t cause many errors on your website. Before you complete your website edits, you want to ensure you test them first before you confirm your edits. Staging environments should be utilised before you make any changes, no matter how small the edit is. Even the experts at a Manchester-based creative agency would also trial their edits in a staging environment before making these changes.