How to Customize a WordPress Theme from Scratch?

When it comes to WordPress, you get many options to choose from to build an appealing website. However, with a majority of people using the same themes and plugins, customization becomes quite necessary. Though it is a scary project especially if you have spent hours creating a website, there’s nothing more rewarding than a customized website.

Services of Custom WordPress development has gained in popularity and an increasing number of webmasters and developers are trying to customize their WordPress themes as much as they can to get a unique site. Customizing a theme involves a lot of things than simply switching between themes.

Therefore, we decided to show you a guide on how you can easily customize your WordPress theme from scratch. Also, what important points you need to consider before plunging into it.

1. Create a checklist

The first thing you need to do is create a checklist of all things you are planning to do whether it’s simply the design of the site or enhancing its functionality. Also, you need to write down about all the things you changed previously to avoid any confliction. Check all the pages of your website and note down all the additional snippets, custom widgets, plugins and codes that you may have added.

2. Take the backup

Backup everything! You can’t take a chance of losing your whole website in a blink of an eye. Though nothing should go wrong, it’s still better to be safe than sorry. Therefore, it is always advisable to take a backup of your website including the.htaccess file, theme and database, and then start messing with it.

3. Customize the theme on the local server

Making changes on the live website can lead to website failure. Also, you don’t know want to distract your visitors from your website. Thus, it is always a bright idea to set up a local server first to start making the required changes in the theme.

How to customize the theme?

The first of the most things is the creation of child theme.

A child theme basically inherits all the functionality, styling and properties of the parent theme. Child themes are the advisable way of customizing WordPress themes. Also, whenever you update your WordPress version, the changes made in the theme wouldn’t get lost.

Create a child theme:

/*

Theme Name: Twenty Fifteen Child

Theme URI: http://example.com/twenty-fifteen-child/

Description: Twenty Fifteen Child Theme

Author: John Doe

Author URI: http://example.com

Template: twentyfifteen

Version: 1.0.0

License: GNU General Public License v2 or later

License URI: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.html

Tags: light, dark, two-columns, right-sidebar, responsive-layout, accessibility-ready

Text Domain: twenty-fifteen-child

• p>

Therefore, create a child theme first and then make all the necessary changes in it. In order to change the styling of the theme, you need to create a CSS stylesheet in the child theme.

Create a style.css:

/*

Theme Name: Yourtheme-child

Theme URI: www.yourtheme.com

Description: add the required description

Author: Your Name

Version: 1.0

.

General comments/License Statement if any.

.

• p>

Once you have style.css file, you can add as many new properties and styling as you want. You can also customize the header, footer, content, and sidebar of the theme. Simply create all the files in the child theme and make the changes according to your requirements.

Note: You can keep the names of header, footer, content and sidebar files same. However, in order to add new functions, create a new file with a different name otherwise your website will break down.

Jason Daszkewicz is an owner of Wordsuccor Company. This company provides you many services like Wordpress Plugin Development, Custom Wordpress Development Company, Conversion of HTML to WordPress.