How to change your wordpress blog theme

Changing your blog theme is fairly quick and easy. We are going to use File Zilla’s FTP software. You can download a free version here. If you don’t know, FTP stands for file transfer protocol, it’s a fast way to transfer files between your computer and your webhosting server.

Your wordpress theme

You can do a search on Google for “free wordpress themes” and find all kinds of free themes. Just find the one you want, download it (remember where you saved it) and then unzip the file.

Open your file zilla software and enter in your FTP log in information and connect. You can find your ftp log in information on your web hosting control panel. You only have to enter your host, username and password. If you are using hostgator, your host will be the numbers in your web hosting control panel address. For example, if your control panel address is http://12.345.67.8/cpanel then your host address is going to be 12.345.67.8
On the left side of the screen is your hard drive and on the right side is your hosting file manager. The top 2 boxes are your folders and the bottom 2 boxes show the content of the folder you open in the top window. On the top right side, your hosting file manager, open the main folder in the site. Then open the “public_html” folder, after that open the “wp-admin” then the “wp-content” folder. Inside this folder you will see a folder named “themes. Locate the file on your computers hard, on the left side of the screen and drag and drop the file into the theme folder.

You may want to download a few themes when searching for free themes and upload them all at the same time. Just open each file on the left and drag and drop the theme into the theme folder on the right.
You have now uploaded all the themes to the correct folder on your server, time to go activate it.

Activating your wordpress theme

Go to your site now and log in. On the left side of your dashboard open appearance, then themes.
This will show your current and available themes. Scroll down and select your theme. Now go to the site and review the changes you made. If you want to check out multiple themes to pick out the right one, just repeat the last few steps to activate your theme.

Customizing your theme

After you have picked out your theme you can now customize the sidebar widgets. Go back to your blogs control panel. Click on widgets under the appearance tab on the left. On the widgets page the right hand side shows your current widgets for the selected sidebar. If your theme has more than one side bar you will have to make sure you have selected the sidebar you wish to work on. On the left side are all your widgets. After selecting your side bar on the right just add the widgets that you want to that side bar. Make sure you save and select the other side bar to add widgets to them. After selecting your widgets go back to your site and review.