Hey y'all, welcome to another WordPress Wednesday. My name is Kori Ashton here
in San Antonio at WebTegrity where we do all things WordPress.
We're a small group of web nerds that develop custom WordPress themes.
We also teach WordPress. We teach SEO fun stuff.
If you're interested in any of that, be sure to checkout our website.
Today's topic is how to update a WordPress purchased theme.
If you were to go out there and decide that a free option really just isn't
the solution for your WordPress website and you want to pay
to purchase a premium theme, you can certainly do that.
Some of the authors are very generous to allow you to attach a
license key into your dashboard that then allows you to have automated updates.
That is so generous of them but that is a very rare case in this time.
Now what we're seeing is, you actually have to go back to the point of purchase,
download the most recent version of that theme
and then what do you do with it?
That's kind of the process here.
We just had WordPress 4.5 released and a lot of people's websites broke.
Your theme might have conflicted now with that update.
What do you do?
How do you go in and make those changes?
Well, let's get to it.
We're going to actually be using FTP to do this.
A couple of steps you have to do in the first place.
Very first thing that I want you to do is log in to your dashboard and be sure
that you have a backup in place.
We use UpdraftPlus. This is a free plugin
to backup your current website. So you'll see that I just did that.
I backed up the current website.
You'll want to be sure to backup the files and database.
See how this says that? Files and database.
You always want to be sure to have a backup in place. We preach that here on our
WordPress Wednesday channel.
Be sure to have a backup consistently happening on your website.
This particular plugin can do that for you.
You can save it to your Dropbox. You can save it to a couple of other places-
You can save it directly to your server.
If we have any issues as we're updating our theme now, we know we can restore
and not miss any downtime. So this is a great safety net.
Once you've run that backup in place,
you'll want to pop over to appearance and go to themes
to help you remember which theme you're using.
For this particular website we are using the Austin theme
and that is from Themeforest.
We have a child theme in place as well which is the Austin child theme.
The difference with child themes (and I'll put a link in the description box below
so you can learn more about them) is if you have made changes specifically to
the PHP files
in a theme,
those changes could easily be overwritten as we go through this process right now
to update our theme.
If you're a little confused on, "should I have a child theme in place first,"
click the link below and you can go over and checkout
why a child theme is needed
and when it is not needed.
A little bit of difference there but we want to keep moving forward here
with updating this theme.
Whenever you update a theme, you are updating always the parent theme.
You'll go back to point of purchase (which for us was Themeforest for this
particular theme.)
We are coming here to Austin.
To know whether or not you need to do this,
you can click on this and see that it says version 1.8.
If you're seeing some breaks happen on your website
(if something went a little wonky after you've updated something)
it could be that this particular version is now out of date and you need
to update.
We came over here to Austin to take a look to see if the theme had recently been
update and in fact it had been.
Just last week it's been updated.
If you scroll down a little bit further typically in this area, you can find that
this theme is compatible with 4.5 and
that they are now on version 2.1 of the Austin theme.
Ours is definitely out of date and we need to update it.
You'll come here to the downloads area. When you click on this (specifically
inside of Themeforest) you would click on installable WordPress files only.
This is what we want to download.
This will download our most recent version of this theme.
If you're purchasing your theme from somewhere else, (a different website or a
different author) you're more than welcome to just kind of engage with them.
See what their support forms say. Sometimes documentation
inside of these themes will help you with this process as well (step by step)
giving you very clear instruction.
If you haven't been able to find that, that's probably why you're watching
this video.
Once you have all that in place, you will need to have access to FTP.
FTP can be something that you use for free.
It can also be something that your hosting provider gives you
(a dashboard where you get access to your files.)
What we're trying to do is (once we've downloaded that theme now)
is go into your websites server area.
That's what this site is over here.
We've dialed into the server area for this one particular website
and this left side over here is my computer.
This is my download here where I've downloaded the Austin theme.
In order to get to the right spot inside of FTP you're going to drill into a couple
of different folders.
You're going to go to WP content.
Open that up.
We're going to drill into themes.
Open that up.
You should see whatever themes that you have installed on your dashboard-
you should see those here.
We do have one called Austin and this is the one we want to overwrite.
I'm just going click on this and go ahead and upload it.
It should give me and alert here.
Let's see, there it is. Are you sure you want to overwrite everything because
you've got something already named that over here.
We want to say, overwrite.
For now we're going to say, overwrite everything.
Here it goes.
This could be a little bit of a process so just for the sake of time
(so you don't have to stare at me on the screen) I'm going to pause the video
and will be right back.
Well gosh, that totally took forever so I'm really glad I paused that video.
Everything is complete now.
You see here that the Austin theme is over here and the transfer is successful.
Let's take a look at our website and make sure (I'm going to click refresh)-
I just want to make sure that
our break that we saw happening is now functioning correctly.
What we also want to do is just be sure that everything looks correct still
on the theme.
This little hover over effect was what was broken on this theme and was not
functioning correctly with 4.5 WordPress.
Everything else looks correct- our customization to our colors are still here,
of course all of our content is still here.
Now that one little thing that was a little wonky (not functioning correctly)
is working perfectly.
That's kind of the process. First things first, be sure you have a backup in place.
Second thing, be sure that you even need to do this. Make sure that the author's
already created a
new updated version of the theme.
Jump over there. See if there's documentation specifically from that author
to kind of help you walk through this process.
A better case scenario is if that author was generous enough to give you
a license that you can just apply to your dashboard and automatically have
those updates in place so you don't have to do the whole FTP process.
I hope that helps you.
If you have questions about this (and some of you might)
go ahead and put them in the comments below and I'll try to answer them as soon
as I can. I hope you're having a great WordPress Wednesday.
Stick around because next week (be sure to subscribe) I am finally going to put
together my list of top 10 favorite free responsive WordPress themes for 2016.
See ya next week.
Bye, y'all!