Installing a WordPress Theme

By now, you should have a domain name that’s resolving to a generic-looking Web site. Let’s make it yours.

What is a WordPress Theme?

Think of WordPress as a newly constructed house. It has a solid foundation, as well as working plumbing and electricity. But there’s no furniture, no lights, no heating or cooling, nor anything else that makes it a livable home, much less a home you can invite others to visit.

A WordPress Theme is a ready-made set of Web page designs and functionality that you can install in WordPress that turns it into a truly professional Web site. Think of it like the furnishings and appliances in the house I was talking about.

There was a time that building your own professionally designed and programmed Web site would have cost you a minimum of $10,000—and usually a lot more—paid to a Web developer, a Web designer, and a Web marketing consultant. Today, the cost is under $100 to get a fully developed, fully functional, and fully beautiful design of your own.

Who makes WordPress Themes?

Having been in the Web space for over 20 years, I’ve seen first-hand how custom Web development can be a disaster. As a company, you pay thousands of dollars for your initial Web site build, and then over time as things break (as they always do), you’re at the mercy of the developer who built your site.

WordPress helped change the game. By introducing the concept of Themes, it allowed developers to build a Theme once and then allow hundreds or even thousands of people to use it for their own. The most talented developers realized that they could make a lot more money by creating one theme and selling it to many people for under $100 than building individual Web sites one at a time.

A WordPress Theme usually looks just as good as if you’d hired a professional designer and developer yourself. I worked in Web Marketing for many years, and sometimes in order to illustrate an example of great Web usability for a particular industry, I’d pull up a site that sells WordPress templates. With all respect to professionals in corporate America, it’s the developers who are on the front lines competing with each other that really “get it”.

What are the advantages and disadvantages of using a WordPress Theme?

A WordPress Theme gives you much more flexibility and design options than “cookie cutter” sites like SquareSpace and Wix. Those page builder sites generate sites that usually end up looking cheap and derivative.

What’s nice about Themes is that they’re easily customizable; even if two companies end up using a similar Theme, when each adds its own logo, navigation, photos, and copy, their sites come out completely different.

The drawback of WordPress Themes is that they do require a bit of a steep learning curve to get comfortable working with them. I’m hoping that this site can help you gain some of that experience and confidence.

Where do I buy WordPress Themes?

Bar none, the best marketplace to buy WordPress themes is a site called ThemeForest, owned by Envato. All of the best WordPress Theme developers list their products on that site.

You might have noticed that WordPress.org itself has a page where you can choose from over 12,000 “free” themes. While it’s tempting to go with the “free” option, the reality is that most of these templates are thin, aren’t maintained, or are just crippleware—Themes that offer a few basic functions but to access the rest you have to pay.

I’ve tried a few free themes on WordPress.org, but I always find myself going back to ThemeForest, where for an average of $50-70 you get a few months of customer support straight from the developer, free updates to the Theme for life (which is critical), and generally a much more polished product.

How do I find the right Theme?

Envato does a nice job of categorizing their WordPress themes, but it’s their sort functionality that I use all the time. It’s not the best search functionality, but it does the job.

Just type in a few words that describe the kind of Template you’re looking for.

For example (and this is a real-world example), I needed to build a new site for an ophthalmology practice in New Jersey (my brother happens to be one of the partners there, but if you need LASIK they really are one of the best).

Here’s the process I went through.

First, type in keywords that describe the kind of you’re looking for. In my case, I searched for words like “health & medical” and got these results.

I

Here’s the process I follow from here:

1. Click on the button that says Live Preview. This will open a new window with a fully developed demo using the Theme. In many cases the Theme developer will let you click to one of several design variations.
   
   You’ll see a Web site filled with dummy copy, cheesy stock photos, way too many top navigation options, and clichèd headlines. Try your best to ignore those—we can and will be replacing all of that with your own content.
   
   Instead, look at the structure of the home page, the features on site (for example, do you need a photo gallery, an e-mail form, etc.), and the overall general “feeling” of the page. Ask yourself, does this overall Web site design reflect me and my small business brand?
   
   If you don’t see one that blows you away right away, try different searches. Use ThemeForest’s filtering functions to let you sort by Best Seller, User Ratings, etc.
   
   You may need to go through a few Previews, but a few should jump out at you. Trust your gut. Ask your family, friends, colleagues, and most importantly your staff for their opinion. When you do find one you like, make sure to copy the URL to a Notepad file or bookmark it.
2. Now you should have a list of Themes that you like.
   
   Go back to the search results screen on ThemeForest. ThemeForest provides a bunch of very useful pieces of information on that screen: the Theme developer, the price, a star rating and the number of ratings, the number of sales, and the last time the Theme was updated.
   
   Here’s what to look for in each:
   
   • The Theme developer – Click on the Theme developer’s name to see how long they’ve been selling on ThemeForest, how many sales they’ve had, how they’ve been rated, and the number of Followers they have. It’s critical that you find a developer that you can trust will be there for years to come, so that when WordPress releases an update (as it does all the time), the Theme developer can provide you a free update.
   • The price – Generally speaking, you shouldn’t have to pay more than $50-100 for a Theme (which, when you consider the price designing and coding a site from scratch would be is a real bargain). Generally speaking the higher the price the more bells and whistles you get (for example, a Theme developer may include plug-ins which they had to pay a fee to the plug-in developer to include).
   • Star rating and the number of ratings – There is not a review site in the world that has not been manipulated by fake reviews, but ThemeForest does a pretty good job of keeping the reviews real, probably helped by the fact that they only let registered customers submit a review.
   • Number of sales – Number of sales is a tricky one, as you want a Theme that has lots of users (so you’re sure the Theme developer will maintain it) but not one that’s so overused in your industry that all of your competitors use it. I’ll generally look for one with over 500 sales.
   • Last time the Theme was updated – This is probably one of the most important things to look for. If a Theme hasn’t been updated in more than a year, don’t even consider it. That means that the Theme has probably been abandoned by the Theme developer.
3. Once you’re satisfied that the Theme is well maintained and the Theme developer is reputable, you’ll want to look at the features of the Theme, which you can find on the Theme’s main page. Think about if any of these things are important to you:
   
   • Localization: the ability to create translated versions of your Web site
   • E-Mail Forms: a contact form where you customers can e-mail you
   • E-Commerce: compatibility with a plug-in like WooCommerce if you want to sell products and services from your site
   • SEO: a fast-performing site that let you easily customize things like Title Tags using a plug-in like Yoast SEO
   • Design Flexibility: A wide variety of pre-designed modules to use for building different types of pages and parts of pages (e.g. FAQs, image galleries).
   • Elementor or WPBakery: These are “editors within the editor” that allow for much more elaborate design than WordPress’ standard editor.
     
     Be sure to list out what’s most important to you in a Web site—if you hired a Web company, what would you be telling them your biggest needs are? Make sure the theme you choose has them. With WordPress Themes, assume that there’s no “I can just add that later”—even though you can, the process can be really costly.

4. Hopefully you’ve gotten it down to one Theme. Click the green Add to Cart button to add it to your cart.
   
   Disregard where it asks you to “Extend support to 12 months”. If you have questions to the Theme author, you’re going to want to ask them in the first six months.
   
   On the next page, enter your billing information and choose whether you want to pay by credit card or PayPal.
   
   Click the green Pay Securely button to check out.
   
   On your order confirmation page, you’ll see an option to download the Theme you just bought. Go ahead and click the green Download button and save the file to your computer. It should have a filename that looks something like “themeforest-abcDefg-theme-name-wordpress-theme.zip”.

How do I install a Theme I bought?

1. Go to the file you uploaded from ThemeForest on your computer and expand it.
   
   (If you haven’t downloaded it yet you can sign into ThemeForest and select Downloads under your name in the upper right-hand corner. Select Download > All files & documentation.)
   
   Among a number of other files and folders you should see two zip files, one that says themename.zip. and one that says themename-child.zip. These are the files we’ll be working with.
2. Go to your browser and type in your domain name (either your main domain or the temporary subdomain you created), but add /wp-admin after it.
   
   For example. if your domain is new.mycompany.com, you’ll want to type in new.mycompany.com/wp-admin into your browser.
   
   You’ll see the screen to log into your own WordPress installation. Enter the username and password that you created earlier when we installed WordPress.
   
   You’ll see a screen that looks something like this:

2. Go to Appearance > Theme
   
   Your screen should look something like this:

3. Click the Add New Theme button on top. On the next page you’ll see a list of “free” themes that WordPress offers. You can ignore them. Just click the Upload Theme button.
   
   Select the .zip file that you downloaded earlier called themename.zip. Important: do not select the original file you downloaded from ThemeForest. It has to be one of the .zip files within that .zip file.
   
   Click Install Now when you’re ready. It might look like your computer has hung, but look in your top browser tab and you should see a spinning circle icon telling you that it’s working. DO NOT touch any key during this process. Just let the process complete, which could take 3-5 minutes or more.
   
   What’s happening right now is that WordPress is copying the files from your computer onto your hosted server. There are a LOT of files, which is why it takes so long. I wish they’d built in some kind of status bar to tell you the progress, but that’s not possible due to the limitations of Web browsers.

4. If all goes well you should see a screen telling you, once the file is on the server, that WordPress is unpacking and installing it.

5. We’re not done yet. You’re going to want to go back and repeat this process to install the file called themename-child.zip. Just repeat Step 3 and 4, but choose the child theme .zip file.
   
   A child theme is essentially a copy of your main theme that preserves basic changes you might make to the design and layout. This way, when the Theme developer releases an updated version of the main theme, you can copy the updated files over without overwriting the customizations you made to your own site.
   
   Note that the themename has to be the same between parent theme and the child theme.
   
   Once your child theme is installed, you’ll want to click that Activate button.

You can always go to your Themes page and click Activate under your child theme.

Where we are

So now, you have a WordPress theme installed on a WordPress, which is installed on a Web server that your domain name is pointed to.

Let’s start making this site our own.