2.8 Install a Theme

Hey welcome back to the WordPress secure set up guide. We're now moving into the sort of second half of our set up process where we start dealing with things other than just security. And we're going to start with how to get a theme on to your site. Now you have a few themes pre-installed, a few default WordPress themes. And they're all pretty nice But you're almost certainly going to want to put your own sort of flavor into your website. And the best way to do that is with the custom theme. And there are basically two ways that you can install a custom theme. One is by just searching for a theme inside WordPress's interface itself, and the other is by uploading a zip file that contains a theme. So let's look at installing through WordPress to begin with. At the top here, you'll notice we have this add new button. When we hit that that takes us to a page that gives us a few preview thumbnails of different randomly selected themes. And here you can search for the type of theme that you want, say for example, let's look for a minimalist theme. From here you can start browsing through these themes, you can choose one that you might like and then you can preview it. And from there if you decide this is one you wanna go with, all you need to do is press the Install button. Now the theme is become one of the options that you have a available. It's not actually active on your site you can activate it by hitting this button here. Or and now if you go back to your list of themes you'll see that this new theme is in among them, and you can also activate from here. So now if we look at our site on the front end, We can see that a new theme has been applied to it. So that's method one for installing a theme. The other method allows you to install a zip file directly. So if we go to Add New, and this time we choose Upload Theme. Now this is for when you buy a theme from say Theme Forest and you have a zip that the theme is inside of. Then you can browse for that zip file or drag and drop it straight on to this interface and then just hit install now. From here just like with the other method you can live preview or you can activate the theme directly. So now, our new theme, if we refresh, we will see it applied. So that's all it takes to get a custom theme installed. However, there's still something you need to be aware of when you selecting a theme, and it comes back to all of our security that we've been talking about. A theme has the ability to interact very closely with WordPress, and the potential is there that if you install a theme from an untrusted source there may be malicious files included in the theme. So you wanna make sure that you are only install WordPress themes from from one of two sources. You have the free themes they can be browsed for within WordPress' interface, and then themes that come in the form of a zip file that you upload, just make really sure that you're buying from a trusted marketplace. So like Theme Forest or any of the other most well known well respected theme shops. So if you considering purchasing a theme, just do a little bit of homework and make sure that you purchasing from a reputable vendor. The other thing to look out for is people who are selling themes that have been created by reputable vendors, but they're actually effectively selling stolen copies. So if you're looking at a particular theme, make sure that you figure out who the original developer is of that theme, and that you're buying directly from them. You don't want to be in a situation where you've purchased a theme under the impression that you're buying it from somebody trustworthy, when in actual fact, you're buying it from some shifty person who has obtained a copy of the theme, potentially modified it in some way, and then is on selling it to you. And even if there is nothing malicious, in a theme that's being sold by a person who doesn't have the right to sell that theme, you can still end up in hot water by buying from somebody who is not gonna give you the support and the updates that the actual developer will. A good way to look out for this is if you see a theme that you know you want and it sold for x number of dollars in one place then you see it somewhere else on a sold on a discount, be very careful of buying that discounted version because what you might have been counted is a shifty character trying to lure you into buying an unsupported and potentially dangerous theme by undercutting the original developer. So to summarize, just make sure that you get your themes either through the WordPress interface for free themes, or from reputable marketplaces and developers that you've done your homework on and you're confident you can trust. So that covers everything that you need to know about themes for now. In the next lesson, we're just gonna go through a couple of quick basic settings that you'll probably gonna wanna take five minutes to run through every time you set up a new site. So see you in the next lesson.