How to Uncreate a Website Design in WordPress?
You have a new website design in WordPress. You’re so excited to show it off to your friends and family, and you want to make sure they have a good experience while browsing your content. But as soon as they visit your site, you realize they’re not seeing what you intended them to see. It could be hard to figure out how to undo the changes, or at least come back to the previous version. In this article, we’ll break down the steps so you can quickly and easily get your site back to the way you intended it to be.
Make A Backup Of The Entire Site
When you make changes to your WordPress-based website, you’re inevitably changing something. Sometimes these changes are small, like switching the layout of your site from a two-column to a full-width layout. Other times, you might need to remove a few posts or pages, or shift the focus of your blog to a different area. In all cases, a backup is very important. You don’t want to lose all of the work you’ve done because you weren’t careful enough when making the changes. To that end, make sure you always have a back-up of your site before making any major changes. This way, if you do make a mistake, you can quickly and easily restore the original version (minus the mistake, of course!).
Identify The Source Of The Problem
There are certain situations where a WordPress website will automatically generate a problem when you load it up for the first time. For example, if you’ve changed the default theme of your site (which you probably have), then you’ll need to activate the theme manually before the site opens up correctly. Another example would be if the meta description of your website is empty but you’ve added a description to the content, this will also cause the site to be loaded incorrectly. In both of these situations, you can quickly and easily identify the source of the problem. Use your browser’s development tools (F12 in chrome, for example) to monitor the status of your page as you navigate through the site, and you’ll see the exact error that’s preventing it from loading correctly. With these kinds of errors, you can easily work around them by deleting the unnecessary portions of code, or replacing them with the original versions that came with the theme or plugin.
Check Every Link On The Site
Make sure you check your site’s links before and after you make any major changes. Sometimes, while making changes to your site’s content, you’ll unintentionally remove a link that points to an outside resource. When that happens, the link will no longer work, and you’ll have to figure out a way to replace it.
Change The Permalink Structure
If you’ve ever published a post on your site that subsequently ended up on a losing blog platform, you know how annoying it is when the URL for that post suddenly becomes invalid. In these situations, you’ll need to change the structure of your site’s permalinks so they no longer point to that resource. To do this, go to your WordPress dashboard, then click on Settings in the left-hand navigation. From here, you can configure the url structure for your site’s posts and pages. When you do this, make sure you use the _HTTPS protocol (http:// instead of the standard http://), as well as including the \”/\” delimiter between your domain name and the rest of the URL. This way, every part of the URL points directly to your site, instead of to a third-party server.
Use Media Queries To Tailor The Design To Different Screen Sizes
An important aspect of creating a beautiful, mobile-friendly website is using media queries to customize the design for different screen sizes. A lot of websites look amazing on a large screen, but when you shrink the browser window down to a mobile size, several elements (like photographs) become pixelated and difficult to read. Designers use media queries to ensure that the small details don’t get lost in the transition from desktop to mobile.
Test The Changes On A Temporary Website
Once you’ve made all the changes you wanted to to your site’s design, it’s time to test them out. Create a small, static blog that you’ll use to test the changes before publishing them to your live site. This way, you can ensure everything works as intended before committing to these changes.
Now that you’ve got everything set up correctly on your temporary site, it’s time to take a deep breath and enjoy the fruits (or the flowers, if you’re a botanist) of your labor. Hopefully, these tips will help you save lots of time and energy when working on your WordPress-based website, and allow you to quickly get your site back to the way you intended it to be. If you’ve been frustrated with your website’s design, maybe this article will help point you in the right direction. Or if you’ve just started out and want to ensure you have everything set up correctly before you begin making changes, this article will walk you through the entire setup process so you can be sure you’re doing it right the first time.