Choosing a WordPress theme for your website takes some doing. Yet even when you have settled on your choice, there are quite a number of things that can go wrong. If you bought your theme from an obliging vendor, chances are that it will come with support and you will be able to reach out to get your issues resolved. However, if you are using a free WordPress theme on your website, there is every possibility that you will only a limited amount of support from the theme’s creators. The good news is that there are quite a number of things that you can do to troubleshoot a troublesome WordPress theme;
- Update your theme
WordPress is constantly evolving, with new versions being brought into the fold. For their part, theme creators are always making tweaks to their creations that are designed to keep websites going.
If you have been avoiding updating your theme, then this is something that you urgently need to do as part of the process of troubleshooting problems with your site.
Updating your site’s theme is simple enough. You can do through the Dashboard of your WordPress website. So, why is it important to keep every component of your WordPress website updated? Updates are important is that they help plug security holes in WordPress.
- Live preview before migrating
Most of the issue that you will encounter with regard to your WordPress theme have to do with problems that crop up when migrating from one theme to the other. Migrating to another WordPress theme tends to be an involved process.
You will probably lose most of the changes that you have made on the theme that you have been using along. So, what do you do?
The good thing is that WordPress provides you with an option to first live preview a theme before making the move. What you should probably do is make sure that you have enough time, and then begin setting up your site on the new theme through the preview before making the migration.
You will notice that clicking on “Live Preview,” in your WordPress themes takes you to the Customization windows where you can work on setting up the new theme to your liking.
- Disable all your WordPress plugins
This is a very useful way of troubleshooting WordPress websites in general. Though they are an important part of the WordPress experience, plugins can cause issues on your site.
Just to give an example; we recently encountered an issue where the text on our website had suddenly become very small.
After contacting the author of the Theme, he suggested that we disable all plugins and then re-enable each of them. That’s how we discovered that the problem was coming from one of the plugins that were on our site.
So, if you are troubleshooting problems with a WordPress theme, you may want to check whether or not the problem is coming from your plugins.
- Clear the cache on your website
This is another of the steps that you can take as part of the process of troubleshooting your WordPress theme. Clearing the cache ensures that everything will be reloading anew. There are many cache management tools out there. The one that we use on this site is WP Fastest Cache.
- Change your theme
Sometimes, in spite of our best efforts, we still end up on the proverbial brick wall. Should that happen to you, you may want to change your theme entirely. The best thing in this instance would be to go back to one of the WordPress core themes such as Twenty Fifteen or Twenty Nineteen.
Once you have done this, check to see if the issues that you have been having on your website have now been resolved. If not, you may want to get in touch with your web host to see if they can help you troubleshoot the problems that you have been having on your WordPress Website.
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