Have you ever tried changing WordPress themes? If yes, what did you do before doing it? If you haven't, this is the right article for you and if you have, then read what did you miss out and what extra did you do!

The beauty of WP is that it lets the users change to the preferred themes, so easy and effectively. All you need to do is click the activate button and the next thing you see is the modified theme. But before you do that, we have prepared a list of dos' that you should check during WordPress theme development not to lose any important elements of your website.

Be cautious of the Sidebars

Ensure that your new theme is widget-ready because it will make things easier for you while using Sidebar widgets on your website. Sidebars are perhaps the most user-customized area where people make a plenty of changes such as adding images, links, custom texts, advertisement, and many other widgets. In case, you switch to a theme which is not widget-ready, you'll face major challenges in converting your widget-enabled theme.

Note that anything you modify in sidebar.php file of your old theme, will be overwritten. So ensure to add those codes in changed theme sidebar.

Create a Backup

If you are regularly backing up your website, you have nothing to lose. So, backup all of your theme files, database and plugins. It is to ensure that if anytime, anything ever goes wrong, you’ll have a backup able to restore your website, quickly and efficiently.

Testing all plugins

Upon activation of the new theme, ensure you retain every functionality of the old theme. If it's missing on any functionality, use plugins to add that again. Try out all the features including but not limited to single post pages,404 page, the commenting process, search, contact page, archive page, etc. It's important to ensure that all of your widgets are still there and are working.

Various plugins utilise your existing styles to display their output but still secure that they still look good with the new theme.

Cross Browser Compatibility

You should test your website in all browsers because they have a tendency of rendering things differently especially Internet Explorer. Establish that your design looks good and appealing in all the major browsers because of many themes have a penchant for breaking in different browsers. It ensures a compatible website even if your customers are using Internet Explorer to open your business URL.

Let your Users Know

Write a post or blog to put words in your customer's ears about the change. Not only it will help you attracting your audience towards new theme but with that, you can also catch the bugs when users told you about them. Take a look at the issues reported by users and fix them by yourself or with the help of your website's developer.

People have all sort of screen resolutions, browsers, phones, etc, so getting their opinion is important. To make them see goodies, ask your RSS feed readers to visit your website once.