How to Choose and Customize a WordPress Theme?
WordPress Themes - How to Choose, Install and Customize a WordPress Theme?
Chapters:
0:00 Intro
0:15 Already installed WordPress themes by default
0:49 How to upload a WordPress theme?
0:59 How to choose WordPress theme?
1:19 Important characteristics of a great WordPress theme
2:18 WordPress theme preview and ratings
2:39 WordPress theme installation
2:59 WordPress theme customization
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By clicking the Appearance option, then Themes, you can open an overview of all currently installed themes. By default, there will be three themes.
These three themes are basic, so we will install a new one to make our site better and modern.
Let's go to add a new theme.
The first option is upload theme, which allows you to add a theme that you have previously purchased, for example.
Then, you can use filters, popular, latest, block themes, favorites, but probably the best option is behind this Feature filters button. Here, you can easily select the main characteristics of your theme and get search results that suit your needs.
Before we decide which theme we will use on the website, it is good to keep in mind two very important things.
The first one is speed. Maybe, the most important thing is speed. If you choose a theme that is extremely attractive, but works slowly, then it is probably not the best theme you should use. Website speed is very important for search engine optimization and websites that have well performance will be favored in search results.
The second thing is customization without editing the code. Some themes in the free version allow you a lot of customization of the website without coding, while some in the free version will only allow a few adjustments and require you to purchase a theme for the others. In our case, we will choose a free theme that allows us to edit our site the way we want without coding.
Research and make a final decision for your website, and we will use the Astra theme in this tutorial, because we think it is very good in the category of free themes and meets the criteria that we talked about.
After opening the preview, you can see the description, the average rating of the theme and the number of ratings. By clicking on the number of ratings, a detailed view of all comments related to the theme will be opened.
Let's install the theme. The theme is now installed and can be viewed in installed themes, but is not active. We can activate the theme or see the live preview. We will click on the live preview, and later we will activate this theme.
We are on the customization options and as you can see this theme in the free version allows a lot of customization without coding. Let's go step by step.
The first option is Global.
In typography, you choose the font style for headings and body text.
In the colors section, you choose the colors of texts and other elements on the website. When you've defined the colors, write down their hex codes in order to have them to use when needed.
In the container section, the layout can be selected.
In buttons, you can define the design of the buttons.
Scroll to top can be a useful feature, and here its design can be defined.
We will not change anything in the sections Accessibility, Block editor and Misc, and you can check what is enabled and change the details within these options if you want.
Header builder allows us to define the design of the header. There are a lot of options here, and we will choose the set up where the logo will be on the left and the menu on the right side.
Anytime, you can see the layout of the website on different resolutions, desktop, tablet and mobile.
Breadcrumb is very important for search engine optimization, and it is regarding displaying the path of your pages, posts or products.
The Blog part will be skipped for now and come back to it after creating the Blog section and the posts within the blog.
In the page part, you define the elements on the pages.
Sidebar allows us to add a sidebar and define its position, but we will not do anything about that for now.
In the footer builder, there are many options for editing the footer. We will not change anything here, for now.
In the site identity, you define the website icon. The size of this image should be 512 pixels by 512 pixels. This icon will be displayed for all pages in the tab section and other places where this icon is displayed.
The Menu will not be changed for now, and we will return to this option in the next lesson when we will talk about this topic.
Widgets are also a separate topic and we will cover it as a separate lesson in this tutorial, for now, we are not changing anything.
In the homepage section, we can define which page will be the homepage. Homepage is the page that opens by default when users visit your domain.
In the additional CSS part, you can change the design of various website elements.
Let's go to activate and publish, in order to make publicly available everything we have done on our website.