Whenever we change a theme on a WordPress site, a lot of things are affected. That's why the first thing we do is create a staging site (a carbon copy of your site that can be safely used for testing).
Once we have the staging site running we download and install the new theme there. We then check several aspects of the new theme, including:
- Frontpage
- Internal pages
- Blog index
- Blog items
- Widget areas (i.e. sidebar)
Depending on the requirements of the new theme, we try to keep any important elements of the old layout.
We may have to update the image thumbnails or re-calibrate Thumbor to make sure image layouts are looking good.
Sometimes themes come packed with extra functionality (a slider, a special widget or even a full-blown visual page builder). Such transitions require extra work, as we usually need to find alternatives to compensate on the new theme.
We then give you access to the staging site, so you can review your new theme and suggest any changes you think are necessary.
When you've made your changes and are happy with how things look on the staging site, we do a quick switch, replacing the old site with the new one, without any downtime.
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