How to Change Your WordPress Theme (Without Losing Content)

Changing the theme is easy, even when you’re a moderately savvy person who works with wordpress websites regularly. If you know that the website is a simple combination of files and database and that theme ideally should be responsible for styling, while plugins are for functionality – continue reading.

If this information feels overwhelming – you’d better contact your developer or reach out to me for support, as this is quite technical information.

Why switching wordpress themes may be dangerous?

As I mentioned before – Themes on wordpress are made to output the styling of your website – not functionality, but some themes, especially majority of custom themes contain code responsible for content output:

• Custom shortcodes,
• Custom functions that output custom fields,
• Custom search/filtering functionality
• Custom templates
• Custom sections
• Custom widgets/sidebars
• Custom menus
• etc

So when you switch themes – these “custom parts” stop working and your website or its pages looks broken or miss content.

When switching wordpress themes may be safe?

never (1% chance)

It’s rare, but if you had basic theme from wordpress theme directory and used page builder – this may be ok, but no guarantees until code of current theme is inspected. Hope you can do that on your own.

You need to open admin panel -> themes -> theme file editor and review at least main templates and functions.

I would say it’s rare and what recommended way to do this on localhost or staging environment? You don’t need backup if you are not deleting files, but having them is always better than nothing. At least night backup on hosting

With custom themes – you need dev to work on this, and is usually when redesign required.

With child themes – if they use just style.css file without new templates, functions – it may work, but depends on parent theme

What’s optimal way to switch WordPress theme?

If you’re building a new custom theme – try to understand what’s customized in current project and ask the client if he need these ( make requests simple) – clients, pms, marketing teams are not as savvy as devs – they need direction and strategy and unerstand if this is important at all.

btw, if you are doing new theme from Figma design – it also worth checking for some edits that impact marketing, seo etc.

So here is my approach:

1. Ensure you have backup
2. Switch theme
3. Check every template, ex: 1 service page is enough – no need to check all 15
4. Verify that old functions/templates are not needed or needed and working

What to do if something goes wrong after changing WordPress themes?

Revert theme to previous – should help

if this does not work – you may restore backup, but usually its means you need save some options or assign new menus/widgets

What to do if you see white screen of death?

Understand the error – here are most common issues

• it may mean conflict in theme with plugins
• or some important plugin is inactive

Use your hosting panel or connect to your site via FTP to disable your plugins and identify the problem. If the issue is with a plugin, you may need to find an alternative.