Choosing & Switching Themes

Your theme is what turns your content into an actual-looking website — layout, colors, typography, how your homepage is arranged, whether there's a sidebar. Everything you write stays exactly the same no matter which theme is active; switching themes changes how it's presented, never what it says.

Installing a theme

From Appearance → Themes, upload a theme's ZIP file, and it appears alongside whatever themes you already have — you can keep several installed at once and switch between them freely, or try a new one without removing your current one first.

Trying before you commit

This is the part worth knowing about: you don't have to activate a theme just to see what it looks like on your actual content. Live Preview opens your real site, dressed in the new theme, visible only to you while you're logged in — your visitors keep seeing the current theme the whole time. Browse around, click through a few pages, and only flip the switch to make it live once you're happy with it.

Activating one

Once you're ready, Activate makes a theme live for every visitor immediately. There's no waiting period and nothing else to configure — the switch takes effect on the next page load.

What a theme does and doesn't affect

A theme controls how your site looks and how pages are laid out. It does not touch your actual content, your settings, your users, or anything in Tools — all of that carries over exactly as it was, regardless of which theme is active. If a new theme is missing a template for something specific (a custom project layout, say), the CMS quietly falls back to filling that gap with the default theme's version rather than breaking, so you're never left with a missing page while you're still getting a new theme set up.