How safe is switching between themes?

  • Unknown's avatar
    hvacman91 · Member ·

    Let’s say I get a premium theme with 3 columns now. After a year of use I don’t like it any more and decide to go back to twenty twelve. Can it cause a crash? What if I move to another premium theme – 2 column this time. Is it safe?

    Thanks in advance for the help

  • Unknown's avatar
    1tess · Moderator Emeritus ·

    It’s safe. But you may find that you’ll have to reformat various things because themes are all different from each other. Some themes have post formats, which may look very different, some have custom excerpts while others do not, some have featured images, sliders (which work in different ways), different maximum widths, and widgets in different places, different sized header images, an so on.

    It’s safe, but it would be wise to set up another free (private) blog for testing which changes you’ll need / want to make. Export your original site, import to the test blog, then play with how you want the real blog to look. Once you do that, it should be easy to change the real blog to the new theme.

    The export also provides a backup in case you don’t like the new theme on your blog: you can always re-import the backup to the “real” blog and return to the theme you were using.

  • Unknown's avatar
    hvacman91 · Member ·

    1tess,

    Thank you very much for the detailed explanation.

  • Unknown's avatar
    landscapelover · Member ·

    I have been thinking about the same issue – my blog is on MistyLook and WP is encouraging me to move to the new MistyLake, but I am not sure I like it and would like to try out other themes. Will the export / import idea you suggest work with a theme that is no longer supported?

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