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WordPress・Growing look and features

Dress up your site with a theme

You can completely refresh how WordPress looks just by picking a theme. Learn how to dress up your site from over 8,000 free themes, and what a theme really is (spoiler: it's HTML + CSS).

You can now write articles. Next up is appearance. In WordPress, without writing a single line of CSS, you can completely refresh your whole site’s design just by picking a theme. And even after you dress it up, not a single character of your articles disappears—doesn’t this idea sound familiar from somewhere?

A theme is your site’s whole “outfit”

A theme is a dress-up set that bundles your site’s entire look. Colors, fonts, layout, even the shape of the header and footer—all of it changes at once.

The important part is that even when you change the theme, the content like your articles and images stays put. That’s because WordPress manages “content (articles)” and “appearance (theme)” separately.

Adding a theme

From the admin screen, go to “Appearance” → “Themes” → “Add New Theme” to browse the themes in the official directory. There are over 8,000 of them. All free.

The WordPress Add Theme screen. 8,352 themes are laid out with thumbnails, and you can switch between tabs like Popular
The Add Theme screen. For a theme that catches your eye, you can put it on in two steps: “Install” → “Activate.”

There are two steps.

  1. Install—download the theme to your site (more clothes in the closet)
  2. Activate—change into that theme (actually wear it)

Just installing doesn’t change the look. The one outfit you’ve “activated” is the one you’re currently wearing.

How to choose

When there are too many to pick from, look at these three things.

  • Check the preview—with “Details & Preview,” you can try the outfit on before committing
  • Update date and number of uses—a theme that’s updated regularly and used by many is a safe bet (this same sense will help you later when choosing plugins)
  • The official default is plenty to start—the “Twenty” series that ships with WordPress from the start is a simple, high-quality example to learn from

What a theme really is: HTML and CSS

What’s inside a theme?—the answer is an HTML template plus a bundle of CSS. It’s an HTML skeleton that says “pour the article title in here, the body in here,” dressed up with CSS. That’s what a theme really is.

That’s why, when you peek at a WordPress site with the developer tools, you’ll see familiar tags like <header> and <article> lined up. With what you’ve learned, you can read a theme all the way down to “why it looks the way it does.”

How to change just a little without a full outfit swap

“I like the theme, but I just want to change the logo color”—for times like that, the handy tool is the Customize screen. Open it from “Appearance” → “Customize.”

While previewing your site’s look in real time, you can adjust the logo image, colors, menu position, and more without writing code. If swapping themes is “changing your whole outfit,” then customizing is more like “fixing the buttons or hem on the same outfit.” How much you can fix here varies by theme, but if you build the habit of peeking here before you swap themes, you can keep a theme you like for longer.

Summary of this lesson

  1. A theme is a dress-up set for your whole site—change it and your articles don’t disappear (content and appearance are separate)
  2. Add one from “Appearance” → “Themes,” in the two steps of Install → Activate
  3. What a theme really is: an HTML template + CSS—with what you’ve learned, you can read a theme’s insides
  4. When you want to fix just the logo or colors a little, peek at “Appearance” → “Customize” before swapping themes

Try it: swap your site’s outfit

In Playground, let’s change your site’s clothes.

  1. Take a good look at the front-side site first, so you remember how it looks now
  2. Open “Appearance” → “Themes” → “Add New Theme” in the admin screen
  3. Pick a theme that catches your eye from the “Popular” tab, then “Install” → “Activate”
  4. Head back to the front side from the site name in the top left, and check out the transformation
  5. Confirm that “Hello world!” and the article you wrote in the previous lesson are still there, unchanged

If you have room to spare, try on two or three outfits and enjoy how much the vibe changes. It’s a practice ground where a reload resets everything, so there’s no need to hold back.

FAQ

What's the difference between free and paid themes?
Free themes come from the official directory of over 8,000, and anyone can use them. Paid themes are made by specialized studios and often offer more design options and better support, but for getting the basics down, a free theme is more than enough to start with.
If I change the theme, does the formatting of my article text change too?
Things the theme decides, like heading colors and spacing, do change, but the content of your articles (the text, images, and formatting like bold) stays exactly as it was. It's precisely because content and appearance are kept separate that you can dress up your site with peace of mind.