I therefore have no option but to purchase a new theme
You do have one more option. 😉
There are currently 7,751 free themes available, no purchase necessary: https://ww.wp.xz.cn/themes/browse/new/
You can use the Feature Filter button there to narrow down your options.
hopefully it won’t be too much of a big task to copy across
It shouldn’t that big of a deal, many folks do it often just for fun. Your content should not be affected, the most you’ll need to do is re-organize your widgets and menus.
In the extremely rare case that your content is affected, it means that your theme includes its own layout markup (which theme developers are highly discouraged from doing for this very reason). If that happens, switching back to the old theme is as simple as clicking “Activate.”
Joy
(@joyously)
The easiest way to test things is on https://wpsandbox.net/
Don’t make the same mistake twice, of using a theme that does more than a theme should do (assuming your theme does).
Themes should only style the content, not create it and lock you in to using only that theme.
First things first, go into Customizer and preview your site with a different theme. One of the default themes will do, because you want to see if your content is still available to a plain theme. Then you can act accordingly, if your content is custom to the theme. (maybe export, modify, import)
Thanks both – really appreciate the assistance.
James, if I had custom CSS to the child theme, would this be lost by changing and then switching back? (PS, thank you for the link to the free themes – you are indeed correct that I don’t *have* to buy a new one!).
Would you recommend setting up a subdomain to create the new site on a separate wordpress to later incorporate to the main domain (to be as safe as possible that I don’t impact my primary site)?
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This reply was modified 5 years, 9 months ago by
tomjuxta.
Joy
(@joyously)
If custom CSS is added in a style sheet file, or through the Customizer > Additional CSS input, it will remain tied to the theme (child theme). You can switch themes back and forth with no loss of that.
If it was added using a plugin (like Simple CSS) it will usually stay with the plugin, but switching themes means a different markup so the CSS might not apply.
If it was added as a custom theme option (many themes have CSS inputs), it will stay with the theme and likely won’t be useful for other themes without changing the selectors. You can use Customizer Export/Import plugin to write all the options to a file. This can be used to copy it to a testing site, but also just to see it so you can reuse the CSS in a different theme.
Using the Customizer Preview, you are the only one that sees the site with the new theme. Visitors don’t see that until you publish any changes you make. So you can easily switch themes in Customizer “just to see” without damaging anything.
One thing to keep in mind too, if you switch to a different theme, you may very well not need to make any CSS customizations, as long as you choose a theme close enough to what you want.
If you do need to make customizations though, it’s very unlikely that any CSS applied to the current theme will work the same on a different theme.
