While developing a WordPress website on your own can be very easy and exciting, it can also be tedious when you must make big decisions like changing the theme for your WordPress web design.
It is pretty evident 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 like they used to be.
In this blog post, I will share a few areas that could be affected after a theme switch. However, avoiding changing the WordPress website theme on your live URL would be wise.
Instead, you can deploy your existing website to a new/test location or even locally on your system to ensure that your visitors do not experience any usability issues while browsing your web pages.
Anyway, let’s look at the elements that 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 more easily. However, after a theme switch, you may experience that your widget settings will be changed because different WordPress themes have various ways of displaying their sidebars. You do not need to worry because your widgets will still be available; you just need to place them again in the respective sidebars. That’s it.
#2 Menu
It is likely that after a WordPress website theme switch, your current menu will be disabled, and the new theme will display its default menu. This is because you or your web developer may have added a new menu set and called it in the menu placeholder of your current website—no need to worry. You can simply go to the backend, look for the menu options available/created already, and choose your desired menus and their location.
#3 Theme Settings
Each WordPress theme has its settings, which may affect your website design when you switch 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 list existing theme settings before you switch to a new theme because it will help you 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, it is possible that those sliders will not work after the theme switch. This is because your new theme will have a new slider type or may not have a slider at all.
This is why it’s advised always to use the slider plugin instead of theme-specific sliders. This way, your website will not be affected even when you switch to a theme without a default slider. In any case, your slider plugin will always work for you.
#5 Theme-Specific Short Codes
If you have used many shortcodes (to display columns, buttons, etc.) in your existing website theme, they will likely not work with your new theme. Again, just like sliders, during website development, you should always choose a plugin for using shortcodes on your WordPress website so that they are not affected when you 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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