3 Ways to Edit a WordPress Theme (One Is Old, One Is Gold)

While there are plenty of WordPress themes to choose from, they vary widely in the type of design and features they offer. This means that your chosen theme may serve as a solid baseline, but may not meet all of your exact needs. Luckily, you can edit WordPress themes to make your site unique.

There are many other ways to do this. If you’re a beginner or just want to keep things simple, you can use the built-in theme settings or the intuitive site editor. More experienced users may prefer to add custom CSS and PHP to the theme’s files.

Factors to consider before editing your theme

Before you edit a WordPress theme, there are a few important steps you need to take. It’s easy to accidentally change or delete something important, so you’ll want to protect your website during the editing process.

Like:

1. First, you’ll want to create a backup of your site. When you edit a WordPress theme, you may need to replace important files. If you have a backup, you can easily restore your site to a previous version in case something goes wrong.
2. Additionally, you might want to create a child theme. It inherits the features and functionality of your current theme (parent). However, you can edit a child theme without affecting the parent theme. Plus, you won’t lose any changes you’ve made when you update your parent theme.
3. It’s also a good idea to use a staging site so you can test changes to your theme without affecting your live website. Then, once you’re sure the changes are safe, you can easily push them to your live site.
4. Lastly, you’ll want to copy any code you’ve added to your site. This way, if you lose your changes during the editing stage (or later), you can re-paste in the code.

By following these steps, you will be able to safely edit a WordPress theme, even if you are a relative beginner.

Best Ways to Edit WordPress Themes in 2023

Now that you’re ready to edit a WordPress theme, let’s take a look at three different ways to get the job done. Each method has its pros and cons; We’ll start with the simplest.

1. Use WordPress Customizer
2. Access the Full Site Editor (FSE)
3. Edit your theme functions file (using CSS and PHP)

1. Use the WordPress Customizer

The WordPress customizer enables you to change various aspects of your site, including your logo, site title, home page, and color scheme. This is one of the easiest ways to edit a WordPress theme.

To open the customizer, go to Presence, Subject matter, then hover over your active theme and select Customize,

In the Customizer, you can edit any part of your website using the tabs on the left side of your screen. Meanwhile, you can see a preview of your changes directly in the editor.

The tabs you see in the customizer will depend on the features and options available with your theme. For example, with Neve, you can edit your site’s colors, layout, form fields, widgets, and footers:

For example, to edit your theme’s footer, simply click the football section. Here, you can change all of the content that appears in that area. For example, you can change the color of the footer and the copyright link:

In addition, under available components Sections, you can add content directly from your widget areas. For example, we’ve created an area labeled “Footer” that contains a search bar widget.

To add it to your Neve footer, all you have to do is drag the component into the position footer builder,

Immediately, you should see your theme update in the live editor.

You can then customize the look of your footer by clicking on the pencil icon for each element. You can click to edit the entire footer, the widget, or the search bar itself:

You can now use the toolbar to change the position of buttons or enable any search icons. Meanwhile, if you click on plus (+) iconYou can add more widgets to your Neve footer.

choose To publish To update your theme. Then, go to the front to see the changes:

If there’s something you’re not happy with, just go back to the WordPress customizer from your dashboard.

Check your theme for additional built-in options

Most themes have built-in design options. These enable you to edit aspects of your site’s layout and design in the WordPress dashboard. If these options are available with your chosen theme, you’ll find them listed below. Presence,

This is a feature that is available with page builder themes such as Beaver Builder or Divi and premium versions of some themes. Some may even have their own “customizer,” where you can edit anything from colors and typography to widgets and layout.

2. Access the Full Site Editor (FSE)

WordPress Full Site Editor enables you to tweak almost any part of your website including the header and footer. Plus, it uses the same interface as the block editor, so it’s familiar to most WordPress users.

However, when you activate a block theme on your site, you will have access to the site editor. These themes are made up of customizable blocks, making their layout completely flexible.

Once you have installed a block theme, you can go to the site editor Presence, Editor In your dashboard:

if you go to template parts, you can customize areas like your header, footer and any other components of your theme. Meanwhile, if you choose the template you will see a list of all the available page layouts that you can edit.

This can include your 404 page, custom post type, or your front page:

Select the template you want to edit, and then click the pencil icon, This will launch the full site editor, where you can customize your theme template using WordPress blocks.

Edit your front page template with the Full Site Editor (FSE)

Inside the editor, you can click on any block in your template to view the available customization settings. Plus, you can add new blocks to the template or remove any elements you don’t like:

Additionally, the site editor offers a collection of beautiful block patterns. These are pre-designed layouts made up of multiple blocks, so they make for quick theme creation.

To use these features, select + sign Click on More to add new block patterns,

You’ll find patterns for calls-to-action, testimonials, featured content, and more. If you manage an e-commerce site, you may want to add a banner pattern to the top of your page announcing a sale or discount. All you have to do is drag the pattern onto your template:

Then, you can use the toolbar and block settings to modify the colors, sizes, and fonts in your pattern.

Save your changes, and then go to your website’s front to see the result:

With the Site Editor, you can also apply global styles to your website. just click the styles Icon at the top of the page:

Here, you can manage color palettes, change typography settings for different elements, and more.

3. Edit Your Theme Functions File (Using CSS and PHP)

This is probably the most challenging way to edit your WordPress theme. For this reason, we only recommend this method for those who are comfortable with adding and editing code such as PHP and CSS. It is also very important to back up your site before attempting to edit your WordPress theme in this way.

your theme functions file (functions.php) contains all the important information for your theme. The code provided here is used to register featured images, widgets, and more.

You can edit this file by going to tool, theme file editor, However, any changes you make to the file are unlikely to survive a theme update.

Therefore, it’s a good idea to use a plugin like Code Snippets instead.

This method can also be a lot simpler (and less risky) because it doesn’t require you to manually edit the theme functions file. Plus, there are many different effects you can achieve using PHP and CSS.

For example, you might want to remove categories from your homepage or hide the WordPress version number. You can also change the “Howdy” message that users see when they’re logged into your site:

To do this, you just need to find or create the correct code. You can find many useful code snippets in WordPress forums Learn more in the WordPress section,

Add a Code Snippet to WordPress Using a Plugin

In our example, we’ve decided to replace the text “Howdy” with “Welcome”. If you want to do the same, then go snippets, add new, Give your snippet a name to remember, and make sure you’re in the function (PHP) tab.

Then, paste in the code snippet:

Next, use the options below the text field to determine where the code will run. For example, you can run the code on your entire site, in the admin area, or just on the front end.

You can also provide a description of your snippet. This can be useful if you have other users on your site who will not understand what the snippet does. When you’re ready, scroll to the bottom of the page and click save changes and activate,

Now, go to the front to see the change take effect:

If you ever want to reverse the changes, just go to snippets, all snippets And toggle off the code snippet.

Conclusion

Luckily, you can edit your WordPress theme to make your site more unique.

To recap, here are three ways to edit a WordPress theme: