Theme Management

Every theme is already installed. There is nothing to download, upload or license separately - the screen is a chooser, not a marketplace.

The themes screen with the active theme marked and the rest offering Activate or Preview
One theme is active; every other one can be previewed before you commit.

Preview before you switch

Preview is the button that matters. It shows you the live site in the new theme - your posts, your categories, your images - while visitors keep seeing the current one. Nothing changes for anybody else until you say so.

This is worth doing every time. A theme that looks right in a gallery screenshot can be wrong for your content: a magazine layout needs featured images on every post, a minimal one falls apart with long category names, a news theme expects a certain posting rhythm. Fifteen seconds in preview answers questions the screenshot cannot.

Activate switches the live site immediately.

What carries over, what does not

Your content is untouched by a theme switch. Posts, pages, categories, tags, comments, media - all of it belongs to the site, not the theme.

Menus carry over, but a theme may offer different menu positions. A theme with a top bar and a footer menu will have empty slots that the previous theme never had; the menu still exists, it simply is not placed yet.

Customizer settings are stored per theme. Colours, fonts, layout choices and section arrangements you set on one theme do not follow you to another - and, importantly, they are still there if you switch back. Trying a theme for an afternoon costs you nothing.

Widgets and sidebar arrangements follow the same rule.

Customizing the active theme

Customize opens the live editor for whichever theme is active: colours, typography, layout width, header and footer behaviour, homepage sections, card styles. Changes preview in place before you save, and every save is recorded so you can roll back to an earlier state.

That version history matters more than it sounds. Design work is iterative and the third attempt is often worse than the first; being able to return to it removes the fear that stops people experimenting.

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New features, release notes and CMS guides. We send a couple of emails a month.