One of the best things about WordPress is that the quantity of themes available on the internet. The numbers of themes available are astronomical. The enormous availability of themes is because of the open source licensing and is easy create to new themes. Web Designers can easily create new stunning and unique wordpress themes and release it for the public to use them. This short tutorial teaches you about how to install a wordpress theme on a self-hosted wordpress blog.
Getting WordPress themes.
As said earlier, the availability of wordpress theme on the internet is very abundant. Designers release their themes in directories specially made to showcase wordpress themes. One of the most popular wordpress theme gallery is the official “Free Themes Directory” by wordpress. Here in this directory, you can find some of the well coded and designed themes on the internet. They all are licensed under GPL and is free to use and edit.
Though the official wordpress theme gallery has good themes, one can find large varieties of wordpress themes on other popular theme directories specially made to showcase the wordpress themes. I will list some of the best wordpress theme directories here:
To find more themes, just google “wordpress themes“.
Installing WordPress themes:
- Extract the file. The theme files will be present in a folder named after the theme.
- Now to upload the theme, you will need to connect to your server using an FTP client. Use a good FTP client like FileZilla and then connect to the server.
- Navigate to the root folder of your wordpress installation and go to wp-admin –> themes. This is the place where you will have to upload your new downloaded theme.
- Upload the folder containing the theme that you just extracted few minutes ago.
- After you finish uploading the theme folder, login to your wordpress dashboard and then navigate to Appearance –> Themes. If you had successfully uploaded the theme, here you can find it. Just preview it and then apply the theme.
Note: Please do not make any changes in the folder unless you are well versed. And also make sure you upload the folder that contains the theme files directly inside it. Not the folder containing sub-folder of the theme (it works, but is not recommended to do so). A typical folder containing theme files will have only one folder named “images” or “assets” or maybe sometimes an advanced theme might contain more folders like “javascripts” and “php files” etc. Apart from these folders the theme folder contains PHP files like “header.php”, “sidebar.php” and “single.php” etc.
That’s it.
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