How to Change Blog Theme In the Background – While Visitors View Original Theme Intact

The topic of this post has caused me much trouble and many searches for guides have yielded few results. I am in the process of changing my blog theme and I have finally figured out how to change themes safely and easily in the background while visitors see the current blog with the old theme intact.

This is awfully helpful as when you are converting themes, no new theme will fit perfectly with old theme tweaks. Existing ads, comment styles, sidebar contents, widgets and other tweaks that we all have done to our blogs along the way, will need to be customized for the new theme. Some themes break everything or most everything and many changes are needed to be made manually and no one wants to do them live while the world is watching

Step-By-Step Guide to Change Blog Theme in Background

1. Install and activate this plugin: Theme Test Drive

2. Upload new themes that you are interested in, you can get as many as you want to play with.

3. From wp admin go to:
Appearance – Theme Test Drive. From the drop down menu choose the themes you want to preview and hit the Enable Theme Drive Button.

Now when viewing your live blog, you and only you as the admin will see the blog with the theme you selected.

4. Choose your new theme.

5. Check the New Design.

Now you will want to check the new theme for any issues that exist and what maybe missing that was on the old them.

A useful method is to open the live blog in one tab of the browser as well as the theme test drive version with the new theme in another tab and view them side by side.

Look all around the new theme and see what does not look right, check out the Footer, and Header especially since changes to those are usually made in the theme files and will not convert automatically for the new theme.

Make sure your comments look properly with the new theme as those can get weird by the CSS stylesheets in the new theme.

Also any adds, affiliate banners and such that you have manually placed into places like posts, pages and footers, will have to be added to the new theme’s files as those will not automatically convert over.

Basically just check everything to see what needs to be edited.

6. Editing New Theme Files.

Now, you can edit all the theme files for the new theme by going to:

Appearance – Editor - Select The New Theme from Drop Down Menu
Caution: make sure you select the new theme and not forget because you can mistakenly start to edit your existing theme files.

You can also make changes to the CSS stylesheet if needed for the new theme. I personally like to tweak fonts and other styles, but this is totally optional.

This will allow you to make all the changes you need to to the new themes files, and remember that you are editing the new theme and it has no effect on the old theme so your live blog remains the same, and you can preview all the edits in the new theme by continuing to enable theme test drive.

7. Editing Sidebar – Widgets

When theme test drive is enabled, the widget area is updated for the new blog. So, if your new theme has any additional sidebars as compared to the old theme it will show those to you in the widget area, even if your original theme only had one.

This is where it gets tricky…

You can edit the second or third sidebar that did not exist in your old theme all you want, however, the sidebar that did exist will still be the one that shows live on the blog and with that one whatever edits you make will also appear on the live blog.

So, the best thing to do is plan out that sidebar on paper or in your head and save that edit for last and just launch the new theme after that.

You can check your blog analytics for the time of day your blog has the least amount of traffic, for most US blogs late at night should be a good time and do it then so you can tweak any issues in that sidebar while little traffic is viewing your blog, overall this is a not a big deal and should go relatively unnoticed.

8. Launch New Theme

When everything is perfect go to:
Appearance – Themes - Select the new theme and make it live!

I will follow up this post with a long list of places to get very nice WP themes free, so stay tuned!

Any questions?

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