The theme of your WordPress theme is among the most important elements of your WordPress website. It determines how your website appears and how content is presented and creates a modern look for your site, professional and professional.
It also helps you to establish your brand. Sometimes, it isn’t simple. If you’ve made customisation to the look of a wordpress woocommerce theme, changing the theme could result in losing the work you’ve done.
If the plugin you have on your website is not compatible with the updated version of the theme, you must choose which code to be upgraded. And if you’re running your WooCommerce store using the theme you’ve customised, then you’ll have to ensure that this is working following the update.
In this article, we’ll take you through how to make changes to an existing WordPress theme.
Why Should You Keep WordPress Themes Updated?
Making sure that you keep the code of your WordPress website up-to-date is extremely vital. The latest versions of themes, plugins, and WordPress are released for legitimate reasons.
Failure to take advantage of updates can put your site at risk. Let’s look at the three main reasons to ensure that your website is always up-to-date for security, compatibility, and capabilities.
#1 Security
The primary reason to make sure that your website is constantly up-to-date is security. A large portion of WordPress core updates, themes, and plugins or WordPress core WordPress is security updates, which are minor updates designed to address any security flaws.
Since WordPress is open-source software and has an active community that monitors it for security problems and other vulnerabilities, any issues will be discussed publicly, and a solution will be developed as quickly as is feasible.
This is among the advantages of WordPress. The active community makes sure that any vulnerabilities are found and repaired quickly.
However, there’s a drawback: everything means that anyone looking to take down your site will be aware of the issues using a specific version of the theme, such as. They may target sites that use the same variation of the theme.
It would be best if you upgraded your themes, plugins, and WordPress core whenever updates are made available to keep from becoming an easy potential target.
If you’ve installed a quality antivirus program, your site will be notified whenever there’s a new theme edition. So there’s no reason not to run the update. In the next section, I’ll show the best way to do this securely so that your website is running smoothly throughout and following the update.
If you’re reading this, you should be convinced that keeping your website up-to-date will increase the security of your site.
#2 Compatibility
Themes are also upgraded to ensure they are compatible with the most recent version of WordPress. This could occur at the moment the new WordPress release becomes available or after a brief period.
A good theme designer will check the theme(s) against the new version of WordPress (and against the version in development while it’s being made) and make the adjustments necessary to make them compatible.
As time passes, the latest version of WordPress will be released, and your theme might be prone to compatibility issues. Our experience has shown that it’s much less typical for themes to be incompatible than for plugins, but it’s nevertheless something that you must keep an eye on.
When you update your theme, be sure to install the most recent version of WordPress first.
#3 Features
The third reason for keeping your theme current is to get the most of whatever features that the developer has in it.
At times themes get upgraded with new features, or because customers have asked for more features, or simply because the theme takes advantage of the new features that are part of WordPress the platform itself and include additional functions to the theme, making use of those features.
- If your theme comes with fresh features that can enhance your site, why don’t you use these?
- How do you update an existing WordPress Theme on a WooCommerce website
- If you’re currently using woocommerce theme themeforest, you may have altered your theme to be suitable for WooCommerce.
The recommendation from WooCommerce’s team is to update the plugin. This is only required for users who are using versions earlier than version 3.3. You’ll realise that you don’t require the additional code to your themes to make them compatible.
Suppose, for any reason, you aren’t able to update to the latest version of WooCommerce (something we would not recommend). In that case, it’s necessary to transfer the changes you made to an unrelated theme before upgrading the theme.
You’ll Have To Think About This In Two Approaches:
- If you added the woocommerce_content function to a woocommerce.php file that you created in your theme, copy that file over to a child theme, using the current theme as the parent theme.
- If you’ve used WooCommerce hooks, copy the code you used from the functions file in your theme to the functions folder in the child theme. Do not copy the entire file, just the code.
- Another more typical scenario is when you’ve added more template file files to your site to take over themeforest top woocommerce theme files. This can be relevant to all versions of WooCommerce.
If you’ve already done this, you’ll need to make the child theme and transfer the template files to the child theme.
You must adhere to the same file structure used in the theme you originally chose to use. After that, you can activate the child theme following the steps above then test and upgrade the parent theme.
Summary
Now you know the importance of keeping your WordPress theme up-to-date and, perhaps most important, what you can do to keep it updated in various situations.
An up-to-date theme will be more secure, in sync with WordPress core and benefit from any improvements. It’s crucial to do it correctly. Always backup your site before performing tests for updates on your test website first and only after you make changes live.
If you’ve made changes to your template, there’ll be additional work to be done. Create a child theme before you create a parent, and then add any modifications you’ve made or will need to make to this. This way, your modifications will not be lost when you change the theme that you’re using.
