What's the difference between a theme change and a full site redesign?

What's the difference between a theme change and a full site redesign?

When you change the look of your WordPress website, we're normally talking about changing your theme. A theme controls the layout, colours, and fonts of a site. 

It is a preset package which contains a lot of information about the appearance and function of a website -- it's like a framework, or skeleton, that shapes the content you put on your site.

Commercial themes are designed to appeal to as many people as possible, so they often have a lot of features that your particular site doesn't require. They may also not contain features you regard as essential, which means that you need to customise the theme or use plugins for those elements. 

Full site redesign

A full site redesign, or redevelopment, means the developer is creating a custom theme just for you. This is definitely the best option from a user experience, as you get a site that is designed especially for you and your site users -- it's created from the ground up, and all the functionality is exactly what you need. There's no extra weight to slow things down. 

Full redevelopments are priced to reflect the work that goes into them, so they certainly aren't the cheapest option!

Performance Foundry specializes in creating beautiful, high-performance sites: have a look at our seven-step process to get an idea of how we work with you to create a site that is tailored to your visitors' needs.

Theme change

If you want a new look but can't justify a full development at the moment, a theme change could be a good option. This involves choosing a commercial theme and installing it on your site to replace your current theme.  Be aware that your site won't look just like the demo, and you'll probably need to do a fair bit of tweaking to make sure things look like you'd like them to.
We can help with theme changes on our hourly rate. A basic half-day block would cover creation of a staging site for you, installation of the new theme on our staging server, making sure your content is moved over correctly, performance and security checks, and deployment of the new look when you're ready. You can  pick up our half-day block here.
You would be responsible for purchasing the theme and making any tweaks to the new theme to get it looking how you like. Performance Foundry hosting clients have access to some premium themes that we have a developer's license for -- just email support@performancefoundry.com for links if you're interested.
Before you sign up, please read  this information about staging sites.
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