Things You Must Do Before Changing WordPress Themes is made clear here. Changing the theme is related to the overall look of a website. Though this step gives your site a fresh look, it is critical too. If the process does not go on smoothly, you will lose essential elements. So, before changing wordpress theme, you need to obey certain things.
Things You Must Do Before Changing WordPress Themes
You should backup all your plugins, theme files as well as the database as a protective measure. This will ensure the safety of your things. You may choose BackupBuddy.
You must take notes on your existing theme. WordPress users try to find solutions to their problems in the web. They often discover the solutions in snippets form. They add the snippets form manually in their theme. Once the changes are made, people forget them. You need to go through your theme files to record all supplementary added code. Again to compare the two, you need to check your present theme’s load time.
You should ensure that you don’t lose tracking. Most of the users forget about it. The majority bloggers employ some type of analytics like googla analytics or alike services and don’t use plugins to insert the tracking codes. Some modify the codes by opening the footer.php file. In every situation, you would like to copy and paste your tracking code to the new theme.
Activate Maintenance mode for 15 – 20 minutes. It will ensure that everything is working accurately and the visitors will not see a broken site. After setting up Maintenance mode, you can start the new theme.
Be careful of the sidebars and include the codes in the new theme sidebar. Sidebars are perhaps for the most part user-customized region of WordPress sites. You should select widget-ready theme. Sidebar widgets are easy to use and customize. If you switch to a theme that is not widget-ready from a widget-enabled theme, then you will lose all of that.
Take Baby Steps while switching to a new theme. At first, bring minor change to ensure that it works well in all browsers. Being sure about the result, you can make huge changes.
Keep record of the loading time of your old theme and compare with the loading time of the new theme.
Monitor bounce rate of the new theme. If you find that bounce rate has improved, then you can work on that.
Listen to your readers and improve your site accordingly. Users all the time have proposals with the arrival of new design. Communicate with your audience to know what improvement they want and try to work on that.
