How to Activate a Theme on WordPress

Hi, everyone! Welcome to BuildMySiteForFree.com. In today’s tutorial, I’m going to show you how to activate a theme. To get started, what you want to do is scroll down your navigation menu and open up the appearance link. You then want to click on your themes submenu. This will bring you to your managed themes page. From here, you can activate a theme that you already have available and installed, or you can click this install themes link and then search, install, and activate themes from there.

If you don’t know how to do that, you can check out our video about browsing and installing themes from the dashboard, and everything that you need to know will be in that video. But for today, what I want to do is activate a theme that I already have available and installed.

Just to show you what our theme now looks like, it’s this here. It’s pretty simple, but this is how it looks. I want to go ahead and change it. What I want to do is here are the three available themes that I have. All you have to do, it’s pretty simple and straight forward. You just click activate, and once the new page refreshes and opens, your new theme has been activated. It tells you right here. New theme activated, and this theme supports widgets, which is a good sign as well.

What I want to do next is see what this current theme looks like, so all you have to do is click your blog name right up here. This is what my new theme looks like. It already has the same information that I already had to begin with, but the whole layout is different, the title, how each of the boxes look, the search option, even the different static pages that I have contained. The whole color and layout is completely different.

Anytime that I want to go back and change it, you just go through that same process. This is a video about activating themes. Please stay tuned for more videos. Thank you.

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About the Author

Andy Johnson

Andy Johnson has been on the Internet since the its dawn(ie his first computer program was recorded on cassette tape) and his first hard drive cost about as much his current MacBook. His first byline was in 1993 for a local newspaper rag he eventually helmed, and his last “real job” was at a computer start up which ended when it ended. Throughout it all he’s freelanced and blogged. Now he is mesmerized by Search Engine Optimization forever trying to “rise to the top” for the right reasons. He’s been married to his wife Julia for as long as he can remember and has two lovely, wonderful children. He looks forward to sharing the latest in the technical best for all the online entrepreneurs.