A Simple Guide To WordPress Theme Installation

(Reading time: 5 – 8 minutes)

Josh Kohlbach found a hole in the Website In A Weekend curriculum: no article about installing themes manually. Granted, the new theme mechanism largely renders this procedure obsolete… but it’s good information to have on hand. If you manage a WordPress site, you should probably learn how to do this – if you don’t already know.

A Simple Guide To WordPress Theme Installation

-by Josh Kohlbach

This article will take you through the specifics of manual WordPress theme installation.

So you’ve found the perfect look for your new blog? Great! Now since not all themes can be installed via the Add New Themes button in WordPress 2.8+ it’s handy to know how to do it the old fashioned way.

Tools

The main tool you’ll need to download for this job is the FileZilla client, a great free FTP client, or an equivalent. This is how we will get your new theme onto the web server so we can choose it in WordPress.

For simplicity, I’m going to assume you know how to setup FTP with your hosting provider. If not, search their website as they will have information on it in their frequently asked questions and help indexes.

Download And Extract Your Theme

The theme I’m going to demonstrate this with is called Lacenenta. This is a great little free theme that’s got a good administration back end for customizing the look and feel of your site.

Whichever theme you end up choosing, download it to your computer now. It should come in a .zip file compressed to save space and provide a nice little package.

We’re actually after what’s inside the archive to upload to our web server. Unzip the theme’s archive as shown below.

Extract The Theme Archive

Transfer The Theme

Open FileZilla and navigate the left pane to where your extracted theme is stored on your computer. In the right hand pane, navigate to the wp-content/themes/ directory. See the picture below, this is how your FileZilla client should look:

Login to your FTP server

Instead of transferring one file at a time (that would be tedious), transferring the theme is best achieved by going up one directory on the left hand side and left as shown above and clicking and dragging the theme’s directory to the right hand pane. Just drop the directory into the whitespace on the right hand pane and your transfer should start:

Transfer the files

Select Your Manually Installed Theme In WordPress

Once your transfer is complete you’ve done all the hard work.

Close FileZilla, open a browser window and navigate to your administration panel for your WordPress website.

Goto the Appearance menu and click on Themes.

Our new theme should be installed and will appear in the available themes section underneath the current theme.

Selecting your new theme

To preview what your theme will look like on your website simply click on the image of the theme, or click on Preview and another window will popup with a mockup of your new theme.

Preview the theme

To activate your new theme and start using it, choose Activate “Your Theme” in the top right hand corner of the preview screen.

Once the activation is complete, navigate your browser to your website’s address and you’ll see your new theme in action!

Check out your blog’s new theme

Conclusion

This is a great skill to have because there are lots of fantastic themes out there, as well as custom designed themes, that aren’t in the WordPress.org archives.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this quick tutorial on how to manually install a WordPress theme the old fashioned way.

Josh Kohlbach is a professional freelance programmer and web designer based in Brisbane, Australia. Josh's blog Code My Own Road is packed with small business tips and technical tutorials for Do-It-Yourself entrepreneurs.