If You Are Upgrading WordPress, Follow These Simple Steps to Maintain the Customization
As a beginner, when you want to customize your WordPress theme, you simply paste code snippets directly into your theme files. This becomes a problem when a new update is released for your theme, because updating a theme wipes out all customization. In this article, we will show you how to update a WordPress theme without losing customization — there are many ways to upgrade a WordPress theme, from automatically upgrading to ensuring a customized theme isn’t unintentionally over-written.
Back Up Your Theme Files
Use whatever method you feel most comfortable with. You may want to simply copy your entire WordPress directory to your computer using FTP and backup your database with a plugin. Automated backup tools can run on a schedule to help make sure your site is always stored in a safe, off-site location.
Automatic Upgrades
Automatically upgrading your theme is easy and straightforward. There are a couple of ways to take advantage of automatic upgrades: In your WordPress dashboard, go to Appearance > Themes — any themes with updates available will display an alert banner, so click the theme you want to upgrade and click “update now.” Alternatively, go to Dashboard > Updates, select the theme you want to update and click “Update Themes.” This is also a quick way to update multiple themes at once.
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WordPress 3.7 introduced automatic background updates for themes and plugins, which is disabled by default. This feature will only work for themes downloaded from the WordPress Theme Repository — if you’re using a premium theme, it will not automatically update, and premium theme providers usually offer their own instructions for upgrading.
Uploading and Replacing an Existing Theme
Most theme providers require that you manually upload a new version of a theme and replace an older version in order to upgrade it. If you try to upload a new version of a theme that’s already in your site’s themes directory via Appearance > Themes > Add New, it will fail with an error, since you can’t have two folders with identical names in your themes directory. There are a couple of simple solutions: login via FTP or cPanel and delete the old theme before uploading the new version (after making a backup), or rename the old version of the theme (e.g. to “theme-old”) so you can successfully upload the new version alongside it.
Upgrading a Customized Theme
A child theme is a theme that inherits the functionality of another theme, called the parent theme. Child themes allow you to modify or add to the functionality of the parent theme without touching your original theme’s code — letting you update your site without the threat of losing all the customizations you’ve made. If you want to upgrade your theme but made customizations without using a child theme, read on.
Uploading Only Changed Files — If you’ve made changes to your theme’s code, check if the updates in the new version are extensive. If your theme’s developer has published a changelog and only a file or two have changed, you may opt to just upload and overwrite the files in the older version via FTP or cPanel. If any of the updated files are ones you’ve customized and you remember which lines you changed, you can make the customizations again via Appearance > Editor.
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Re-customizing Your New Theme — If you remember all the customizations you made to your theme, or saved them somewhere, the easiest way is to automatically upgrade it as per the methods above and then make the customizations to your site again. It’s annoying to do this a second time, but at least you can implement a child theme this time so you don’t have to worry about it again — make sure you back up your site before doing this so you can revert if something goes wrong.
What If I Can’t Remember My Customizations? If you haven’t saved your customizations somewhere or can’t remember what changes you made, don’t stress — it makes it harder to upgrade your theme, but it’s still possible. There are programs that can help you compare two versions of your theme, i.e. your old version versus your old customized version, or your old customized version versus the new version.
Upgrading themes to the latest version ensures you have not only the most feature-rich version, but the most secure one too. Whenever you do update your themes, always make a backup of everything — your old theme, database and new theme. If something does go wrong while editing your files, you’ll have a backup available so you can start the process again without losing any important files.
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