How to Update your WordPress Theme Without Losing Any Customization

by Xicom UK Best Wordpress Development Company In UK

WordPress regularly releases new version of its WordPress CMS or theme from time to time having latest features, security patches and updates. WordPress experts recommend to update your WordPress website to latest version of WordPress to get these updates and security patches for your site. But one of the problem WordPress developers faced after updating to latest version of WordPress is that they lose the customization they did to their WordPress site.

Lets discuss some of the ways by which you can update your WordPress site to the latest version of WordPress without losing the WordPress customization you have made to it.

Just for a precaution, before making any changes to your site or updating your WordPress, make sure you back up your site. You can go to your hosting cpanel to do that. In case something goes wrong you can revert it back to the normal.

How to Update WordPress automatically?

Whenever a new version of WordPress is released, the WordPress dashboard will give notification to update your WordPress to the latest version.

You can update it by clicking simply the update now button by going to Appearance > Themes in your WordPress dashboard.

After the release of WordPress 3.7, you can automatically upgrade your WordPress theme without having to update it manually so that your WordPress always remain updated to the latest version.

You can add the following code to your functions.php file, to automatically update your WordPress.

add_filter( ‘auto_update_theme’, ‘__return_true’ );

l Preserving your Tweaks if you are using a Child Theme

Automatically updating WordPress is used by many WordPress developers and website owners to ensure they get the latest version of WordPress with enhanced functions and security fixes. But if you have made WordPress Theme Customization on your parent theme and not using a child theme then you should not use automatic update of WordPress.

As WordPress is very flexible hence you can easily enhance its features by simply adding code to your functions.php file. Some of the WordPress users simply tweak their parent theme file by customizing the CSS or functions.php files, to enhance or change some of the features of their WordPress theme. This is not a right practice as when you will update your WordPress, you will lose all the tweaks or changes which you have made to it. Also automatic updates can even make your site broken.

Hence you should use a Child theme if you want to preserve all the tweaks you have made and without breaking your site.

If you are using a child theme then you can make any customization on it without touching the parent theme and hence you won’t lose anything while updating the parent theme.

If you are planning only slight changes to your CSS files then you don’t need to create child theme. You can just create a custom CSS file or install and use some plugin.

But if there are lots of changes then creating a child theme is the best option.

l Preserving your Tweaks by Comparing old and new WordPress themes

If you are not using a child theme and you still did customization on your parent theme then even after updating you can preserve the customization.

You can do this by simply copying the tweaks and pasting it to your latest theme after updating it. If you don’t remember and identify all of your tweaks which you have made. You can do that by comparing the current theme with the latest theme. Once you have identified it, you can copy and replicate it to your new WordPress theme.

l Preserving the Tweaks by using file comparison software to update your WordPress theme

Download your current theme and the latest theme to your computer one by one. In order to download current WordPress theme from WordPress dashboard, you need to have an FTP access. Else you can use WP File Manager Plugin which works absolutely fine. After downloading your current theme, you need to download the latest version of your theme from the official WordPress directory.

Now you can use a file comparison software to compare your current theme with the latest version. You can use WinMerge for this purpose. After installing it on your computer, open both the themes on WinMerge to compare. WinMerge will show a list of directories and files in both your themes. It will also show you which files are new and which are not identical. Now right click on a file and click compare to see the changes on both themes. You can easily identify what changes you have made to your current theme. Now you can copy the tweaks to the latest version of your theme. After that, just overwrite your current live theme by uploading it to your WordPress theme directory using FTP or WP File Manager plugin. You can verify that the tweaks are retained on your WordPress site and everything is working fine.

Conclusion

We have just explained how you can update your WordPress themes without losing any customization which you have made to it. Just for a precaution, you can backup your content and database to make sure you won’t lose anything even if anything goes wrong.