Customize WordPress for a Website

Did you spend three months in a Bootcamp, and they didn't cover anything to do with CMS and barely scratched PHP? That's what this blog is about. Here we will find out exactly how to customize WordPress. Well, honestly, WordPress is the most popular platform for creating websites and blogs. As a matter of fact, WordPress is so popular because of the endless possibilities for customization using themes, plugins, and more. Customizing your WordPress website isn't hard either; even beginners who don't know a thing about code can do it.

This blog is for you; if you have bought a domain, you are sorted with your logo, and favicon and now you want to activate your new WordPress theme. By the end of this blog, you will find out

·    how to get started with WordPress Customization,

·    Customization of WordPress to get traffic and engagement,

·    Testing your WordPress site.

Let's dive straight into how you can build Your WordPress Pages by setting up a Menu structure.  Here is a quick infographic to see how easy customization is when you know which step to perform.

WordPress Customization:

The Word press Customization is usually intended to achieve good traffic and customer acquisitions. For that, some groundwork is required, which means implementations of some rack metrics such as:

·         Most popular pages and posts on your site

·         Top referral sites that link back to your site

·         Top outbound links from your site

·         Form views, submissions, and conversions with form tracking

But before that, we must know which theme to select. WordPress themes are nothing more than the hierarchy of the template parts, which spaces like hero images, navigation areas, sidebar, and footer. So, all websites have some sections to them based on the niche they operate once the theme is sorted. So, now it's time to make some folders to stay organized throughout the making of a website.

Get Started with the First Required Template:

Creating our WordPress theme here to start; we're going to be doing a fairly basic theme, but it will have all the features of a custom WordPress theme, and we're going to start out with the required files that you need in order to set up a WordPress theme.

Get WordPress set up and installed on your local server or a live web server somewhere, as you will need to have WordPress installed and running to create the custom theme, assuming those two things are already complete. The approach here really applies to any template you're going to be making, so let's get started with the first required template files.

Okay, it is essential to figure out the structure of a WordPress theme and where those files need to be uploaded nowhere in this sidebar with your main WordPress directory with all the WordPress files that are installed when you unpack and download the zip file.

 

Set up Menu Structure:

A responsive theme breaks down to a mobile point. So to set up a menu structure, have a home page that has a little featured slider and a few things like that, have a post page where blogs come with a comment section with nested comments and replies as well and a blog page so this would be like a static page like an about or a contact page or something like that.

We have our blog archive page, which would list all of our blog posts in some archive fashion with our subsequent links as well, and then we have a contact us page just to simulate a simple web form. 

 

Convert Entire Layout into custom WordPress Theme:

Converting this entire template into a custom WordPress theme. WordPress themes are really nothing more than a hierarchy of template parts, and what we mean by that is a WordPress template, or custom theme does is it takes all those various sections and splits them apart into individual files. Hence, it's sort of like creating components from your template.

 

Couple of minor things to finish up:

One is the 404 template. Now a 404 template is the page that shows when somebody navigates to a link that's broken or something on your website so what we can do is SEE that obviously no posts on the 404, so you can go ahead and delete this loop from the admin dashboard with the header one that says page not found.

A few things that we didn't cover. Somewhat popular inside of themes, one is a thing called custom post types so that you can add those in your custom theme. What that allows for you to do is have your post types, so instead of just having posts and pages, you could have one called reviews, and you could have one called videos. You can add a new review, so you can customize any of those main hierarchical categories. There's another thing called custom fields that allows you to add custom fields to your posts or pages, an example is the addition of a recipe.

Conclusion:

Finally, a real custom theme development tutorial, although there is much content available online on custom WordPress on Google and Youtube, where developers have been aggressively uploading guides for almost 2-3 years. But this blog covers your foundational concepts if you still haven't found one to guide you on installing an existing theme and other surface-level stuff like HTML and CSS. In addition, you can visit our blogs, where we talk about content marketing, mobile app development, and artificialintelligence.