Home / Beginners Guide • Customizations • Themes Customizing a WordPress theme or Website Author verboxe Published January 23,2025 Comments Start Conversations ... Modified January 23, 2025 Beginners Guide Customizations Themes
WordPress theme customization or website customization is a very beneficial skill. You can monetize this skill over different freelance platforms or make your local clients just by providing them with basic website development services. If you truly understand how to customize WordPress website properly. At this point, if you are unaware of How to install or select a theme for your WordPress website, please check these articles. How to install a theme on WordPress website Importing Demo Data in WordPress theme Let’s move over to next part, How we can customize theme after demo data is imported. There is are a few global settings in every theme, global means these setting take effect overall website like Website’s name , its favicon, its tagline etc. For access built-in customization panel of theme, login to admin dashboard by adding /admin at end of your domain name. Here is the example link WordPress Admin Dashboard. Under Appearance menu there is Customize section, clicking it will open WordPress customizer panel, as shown in picture below. The most important sections are Site Identity, Colors, Post Settings, HomePage Settings, Widgets. These settings are different based on support provided by theme developer in customizer panel. So every theme has different settings, When you buy a paid theme from any premium themes website like Theme Forest Themes, you can see the settings provided in theme documentation. So what these settings do ? Site Identity Site identity lets you change, Logo, Website Name and its Tagline like “Just another WordPress website” thats default tag line for any theme in WordPress mostly for builtin themes. Colors Colors let you change site wide text colors, like for Anchor tag, Paragraphs, Headings etc. HomePage Settings HomePage Settings, often reffered as Front Page in few themes, lets you select the landing page of your website and blog page. This setting allows you to select any page which you want to set as your homepage for the website Widgets Widgets are most important of all, these are like portable code scripts, you can add widgets to any page area or header or footer of the website based on if the support of sidebar is provided, clicking on widgets , you will see all the sidebars currently place in your theme, think of sidebar as a container to hold some content, now you can click sidebar, pick a relevant widget from add widet button under this sidebar, do widget settings and save to see the effect on your website, in below picture we are placing a widget in footer sidebar, to see all the supported widgets and sidbars goto WordPress admin and in main menu click on Appearance > Widgets to see all widgets and sidebar. Tip: keep in mind you can drag a widget over a sidebar to place it over this page. Additional CSS Additional CSS allows you to enter css styles to your website without going to code, like if you want to change the background of body tag in website just, write this code script in css, body{ background: red; } write it inside additional CSS and save to see affects on the homepage. If you need more information on CSS, and how you can style your website, go to Learn CSS here So, based on themes you will find different settings. If you are theme developer and want to add a few settings or know how to code , You can add settings of your choice, here is the official Codex Customizer API page which defines all the rules to controls in customizer.