How to Edit WordPress Themes: A Complete Guide

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how to edit wordpress themes

Sometimes, there are problems you can experience with your website. Sure, you have your WordPress site up and running. Sure, you have your favorite WordPress theme up and running.

There will be times where you want more out of it.

Free WordPress themes are a dime a dozen. The problem with these themes is they don’t reflect you or your business.

When this happens, you need to know how to edit WordPress themes. If you can create a WordPress theme for yourself, you can do a world of customization for your needs.

In this guide, we give you everything you need to know about making a custom WordPress theme:

1. Install WordPress

The first thing you would want to do is install WordPress.

One of the best quality of life steps you can do is to install your custom WordPress theme on staging. This can happen in either a local server like MAMP, WAMP or XAMP. These let you to create a WordPress theme without wrecking your website.

If your web hosting does not provide a staging area, the best way to do a test run is to create a test page. Create a subdirectory where you can:

  • play around with details
  • protect it with a password
  • using a disallow in robots.txt

Most web hosting services give a one-click install of WordPress and a database. Do so as soon as you can, otherwise, you would need to do a manual WordPress installation.

2. Pick the WordPress Theme That Will Undergo Customization

Now that you have WordPress installed, it’s time to pick the WordPress theme that you want. Many creative people will look into ways to create a WordPress theme for themselves. Not all people have neither the time nor the willingness to spend time creating from scratch.

Instead, there are ways to get different WordPress themes that have the basics you need. You can find many free WordPress themes online that will have designs that work. There are also paid themes, providing abundant theme options and child themes for frameworks.

There are a few hits and miss with these themes, with an argument that stems from a root problem. A free theme has one of the best price tags out there. In services that are free, you’re stuck with whatever issues the theme has.

Many free themes will not have the same community or support that paid themes provide.

As for paid themes, what your money is paying for is not all about the custom WordPress theme. It can get you developer support on a subscription, documentations, and even theme updates as needed.

3. Using a Child Theme

When you’re doing customization, the top priority is using a child theme.

One of the biggest rookie mistakes is to edit the core theme files instead of editing child themes. By editing child themes, you can keep on editing to your heart’s content without changing core files. This prevents you from breaking a perfect, operational custom WordPress theme.

You also lose any of the changes when you update the theme, which means trouble for you.

To start working on child themes, it’s best for you to have a separate folder. You want a place where you put your new style.css and get you ready for importing the parent theme stylesheet.

You would want to do an @import command to create a child theme. Once you do so, you can further do your customization by adding more rules to it.

4. Working on Functions.php

After you work on the style.css, the next place you work on is your functions.php. Its job is easy but crucial. The functions.php handles enqueueing.

Enqueueing is the technique for preventing the need for adding more scripts and web pages for every change. When you create a WordPress theme, enqueueing prevents the need to add many new lines for element.

To take advantage of enqueueing, you want to take advantage of two scripts. These are the wp_register_script() and wp_enqueue_script().

Wp_enqueue_script only allows for script adding on the front-end, not the back end. You would want to register your scripts first and then do an enqueue.

5. Editing Your Custom Header

The first customization you need to do is a custom header. The header is the most identifiable part of your theme, which, together with the logo. When you create a WordPress theme, you want to handle your header and logo in one place.

When creating a custom WordPress theme, use the built-in WordPress customizer to your advantage. Add images to use for headers by using images from your image gallery. It’s best to try and follow the dimensions that the customizer asks.

6. Modifying Template Files and Theme Hooks

Most of the customization when you create a WordPress theme happen with style.css and functions.php. Even then, there are times where you need to customize your template files too. You would want to create a custom child file for the page.php and paste it to your child folder.

Once you finish with the template files, you need to prepare to use theme hooks. Hooks like action hooks and filter hooks allow you to modify almost everything about WordPress. Manipulating these hooks make learning how to edit WordPress themes work it.

Action hooks allow for altering of default behavior in a theme. Filter hooks allow for appearance modification.

Learn How To Edit WordPress Themes!

When learning how to edit WordPress themes, make sure to learn ways on making your website unique. From making sure you use child themes to enqueueing scripts, you need to do the best practices. Make sure to be methodical on your step by step when doing customization.

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