While developing a WordPress website on your own could be very easy and interesting, it could be tedious at the same time when you are required to take big decisions like changing the theme for your WordPress web design.
It is quite obvious that after a few months or years of your WordPress website development, you may want to change the design of your website. Finding and selecting a new theme (free or paid) is not difficult but the challenge starts when you install and activate a new theme and your website elements are not visible in the same way they used to.
In this blog post, I am going to share a few areas which could be affected after a theme switch. However, it would be a wise decision if you don’t change your WordPress website theme on your live URL.
Instead, you can deploy your existing website on a new/test location or even locally on your system just to make sure that your visitors do not experience any usability issues while browsing your web pages.
Anyway, let’s take a look at the elements which could be affected after a theme switch and you need to check & make sure to fix them.
#1 Widget Settings
Widgets allow you to place different elements in the sidebars of your website in an easier way however after a theme switch, you may experience that your widget settings will be changed because different WordPress themes have different ways to display their sidebars. You do not need to worry at all because your widgets will still be available and you will just need to place them again in the respective sidebars. That’s it.
#2 Menu
It is likely after a WordPress website theme switch that your current menu may be disabled and the new theme will display its own default menu. It’s because you or your web developer may have added a new set of menu and called it in the menu placeholder of your current website theme.No need to worry. You can simply go to the backend and look out for the menu options available/created already and simply choose your desired menus & their desired location.
#3 Theme Settings
Each WordPress theme comes with its own theme settings which may affect your website design when you switch over to a new theme. When I say theme settings, I refer to the section where you change the logo, site name, background image, etc. It is always a good practice to make a list of existing theme settings before you switch to a new theme because it will help you to restore all the previous settings to the new website design.
#4 Theme-Specific Sliders
If you have used theme-specific sliders during your website development, then there could be a possibility that those sliders will not work after the theme switch. It’s because your new theme would have a new slider type or it may not have a slider at all.
This is the reason that it’s advised to always use the sliders plugin instead of theme-specific sliders so that your website is not affected even when you switch to a theme that doesn’t come with a default slider. In any case, your slider plugin will always work for you.
#5 Theme-Specific Short Codes
If you have used a lot of shortcodes (to display columns, buttons, etc.) in your existing website theme, it is likely that they would not work with your new theme. Again, just like sliders, during your website development, you should always choose a plugin for using shortcodes on your WordPress website so that they are not affected when you decide to change your website design.
If your WordPress website is not working well after switching over the theme, you must contact your WordPress developer ASAP to fix this issue.
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