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If you’re just getting started with WordPress, one of the first things you’ll want to do is get the design right, which usually involves installing a new theme.
But how? Well, fear not, because as part of our new new YouTube channel, we’ve put together a handy step-by-step guide.
How to install a brand new WordPress theme:
– (note: video credits to Topher DeRosia – creator of HeroPress)
Video Transcript:
Hi! This is Topher with WinningWP. In this video I’m going to show you how to install a brand new WordPress theme. Here we are looking at our current WordPress theme this is 2016. I personally like it, it’s very clean and easy to read but I can appreciate how it might seem a little bland and you might want to check out something else, so let’s see how to do that. First we want to log in to WordPress. Then we want to go to Appearance -> Themes. Now these are the themes that we have installed currently, but we want to find a new one so I’m going to click add new. And there are many suggestions here. There’s popular latest, and favorites, but I’m going to search for one that I really like. And there it is. Now when you hover over it you can choose details in preview and it will give you some information and this is a preview of the theme. You can click install here or you can close out of this and come back and there’s an install button right here on the icon as well. Let’s click this one. And that’s it! The theme is installed. Now my site is not using it yet. In order for that to happen I need to also activate it. And I can do that now, or if I wish I could install several others and then go through and activate them in quick series to see what they look like. But for right now I will click activate. And now “Make” is my current active theme. And if I go to the front of my website you’ll see that it looks a little different. Here at the bottom you can see that it says “Built with Make”. Now there’s another way to install a theme as well, and that’s to upload a zip file that contains your theme. Now normally you would get this if you purchased a theme from a store. The process is similar; we’ll click add new and then at the top there’s an “Upload Theme” and we can choose our file. And right here at the top is a theme that I have downloaded previously called Stargazer. And I will click install. And now it’s installed. And the behavior is similar to the previous way it just looks a little different. Right here is an activate button. And now I’ll click that and now Stargazer is my active theme. And if I look at the front of my site. I’m looking at the Stargazer theme. And that’s all there really is to it. There are two ways to install, either from the WordPress repo by searching or uploading a file. But let’s review the steps more carefully. First you need to log in to your website at /login. Then we go to Appearance -> Themes. We click “Add New”, search for your theme, click install and then if you wish, click activate. Now as I mentioned you don’t need to activate a theme immediately after installing it. You can install three or four and then go through and activate them one after another checking them out. Now if you’ve purchased a theme or built one yourself, or maybe a friend gave you one and you have a zip file. The process is quite similar. You log in to your site and go to Appearance -> Themes. You click add new, then you upload your file and click activate. You can install as many themes as you wish without any harm to your site but I do recommend that you delete any themes that you don’t use long-term. They’re of no use to you but a hacker could still access them and if they sit there getting old then sometime in the future they may find a security hole in one of those old themes. So for safety sake delete any that you’re not going to use. If you’re interested in a blog post on this topic, check out the information below this video for a link to WinningWP, where there’s a great blog post about installing WordPress themes. If like to learn more about WordPress check out WinningWP.com.
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