How to Install WordPress Theme

How to install a WordPress theme

There are several ways to install a WordPress theme. Let’s look at the main ones.

• installing a WordPress theme from the official catalog via the site’s administrative panel
• installing the downloaded WordPress theme manually from zip via the site’s admin panel
• installing a WordPress theme via cPanel from zip.

Installing a WordPress theme from the official catalog via the site

The official WordPress theme catalog contains thousands of free and paid themes for every taste and every need. To install a WordPress theme through the site, you need to:

1. Log in to the WordPress admin panel.
2. From the menu, on the left, select Appearance and click on Theme. After clicking, you will see a list of pre-installed themes.
   
3. To install a theme from the official WordPress catalog, click Add new and then you will see a list of available themes for installation. For ease of selection, you can use the characteristics filter. When you hover the cursor over each theme, the preview button for the theme template appears.
4. To install the selected theme, click Install.
5. When the installation process is complete you need to apply the theme on the site by clicking Activate.

How to Install the WordPress Theme Manually From Zip

If you purchase a WordPress theme from ThemeForest or Envato or any theme site, it usually comes in a .zip format. This is how to install it after you have downloaded it:

1. Log in to the WordPress admin panel.
2. On the menu, select Appearance and click on Theme. After clicking, you will see a list of pre-installed themes.
3. To install a WordPress theme in the format .zip you need to click on Add new. Then click on upload.
4. Then click on choose file to upload the downloaded wordpress theme. Important! Make sure that you are uploading the archive in the. zip format
5. After uploading it correctly, a page will open with a notification that the theme has been successfully installed and three options:: View, Activate, and Return to the themes page. To activate the theme, click activate.

How to Install WordPress theme in cPanel

After downloading the theme you want to install via cPanel, do this:

1. Log in to your cPanel account.
2. Scroll down to the files section and click file manager.
3. On the next page, click on public html. If the site is an addon domain, click on the folder of the domain.
4. Select your wp-content folder
5. Click on themes
6. Click on the upload icon at the top of the screen and select it.
7. Click on Choose File, then locate the zipped theme file
8. After uploading it, just as I did in manual WordPress Installation on cPanel. It has to be extracted, you can do that by right click and selecting extract.
9. After extraction, a folder will automatically be created with the theme’s name.

And that’s how to install a WordPress theme in cPanel.

Changing the WordPress theme via phpMyAdmin

Sometimes there are situations when after automatically updating WordPress or updating various installed plugins, errors occur on the site and it becomes impossible to log in to the site’s administrative panel or it stops working altogether. In this situation, the first thing to do is to return the default pre-installed theme. But how can I do this if the site’s administrative panel doesn’t work? There is a solution — you can change the WordPress theme via phpMyAdmin. To do this, you must::

1. Find a file wp-config.php. As a rule, this file is located in the root folder of the installed WordPress hosting service. You can find it using a file manager, FTP client, or cPanel.
2. Open a file wp-config.php and find the string define (‘DB_NAME’. After this text, the name of the database will be shown in quotation marks. You will need to edit the database with this exact name.
3. Find out what standard themes are pre-installed on the site. To do this, view the list of themes in the file manager in the wp-content/themes folder. Pre-installed standard themes are usually named twenty fifteen, twenty seventeen, or twenty sixteen. It is necessary to replace the name of the custom theme template in the database with one of these names.
4. Log in to phpMyAdmin (you can do this from the hosting control panel where the site is located) and find the name of the database that you were looking for in point #2.
5. Enter the table with the word _options and find the theme and stylesheet sections there
6. Replace the name of the installed theme with one of the standard ones. If all the items are completed correctly, then the site should earn money based on the selected standard theme.

Important! If all the steps are completed correctly, but the site still doesn’t work, try clearing the browser cache and/or WordPress cache.

Conclusion

There are a huge number of both paid and free WordPress themes, and thanks to this guide, you can easily change the theme on your site yourself. As a bonus, we told you how to change the WordPress theme via phpMyAdmin if you have any technical problems on the site.