Changing themes privately
-
I was curious about changing my theme and some of its CSS privately while my site remains live without showing the changes. I came across this response by someone here in the forums. “As a long-time volunteer here on WordPress.com, my advice would be to set up a second private experimental free blog. Then export your live site to that second blog. With an experimental blog, you can change themes over and over until you find one you like. Your readers will not be aware of your changes while you experiment! Then when you find a theme you love, you can quickly switch your real and live site to the new look very professionally.”
Can I get someone to confirm this? Also, how does that work if I want to keep my domain name? Thank you!The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
-
Hi there. That’s the only way to experiment with themes without it affecting your live site, yes.
how does that work if I want to keep my domain name?
Go to the My Sites page and create a new free blog. Set it to private. Export some of the content from your main site to that blog so you can see any changes with your actual content. Your main site and custom domain will not be affected in any way by this. https://en.support.wordpress.com/export/
https://en.support.wordpress.com/import/On the private blog, find the theme you want, find the look you want by experimenting, and make sure you make notes of everything you do. When you’re happy, go to your main blog and make the same changes there, using your notes and, for example, copy-pasting your CSS code from one site to the other.
To be clear, you’ll need to make the same changes on the main blog as on the test one – there’s no option to merely transfer the changes from one site to the other – but you’ll be able to make only the final changes, so the disruption to your main site should be minimal.
-
Okay, I’m giving this a try, but I have a question. It seems that I can customize anything on the free blog without paying another fee. Is that the case? So I really can’t finalize on the free blog what I want to do to test it out.
-
It seems that I can customize anything on the free blog without paying another fee. Is that the case?
If you’re talking about CSS changes, you can preview them in the CSS panel of the Customizer, but you won’t be able to save them unless you upgrade the test blog as well.
My suggestion would be to test out your CSS in the customizer on the test site, but don’t worry about having to save it. If you find something you’re happy with, copy it to a text file so you don’t lose it if something goes wrong. Once you have all the changes you want, copy it across to the upgraded site where you will be able to save it. It might be a little more hassle, but then you don’t need to buy the upgrade for the private site as well.
Always keep a copy of your CSS customisations in a text file on your computer in any case. If you were, for example, to accidentally switch themes, that would wipe out any customisations you had on the previous theme, so always keep a backup of that code.
- The topic ‘Changing themes privately’ is closed to new replies.
WordPress.com Forums 