Theme Installation

Before you begin, you will already need to have your site hosted somewhere and installed with WordPress. If you don’t have a web hosting account already, please see our list of preferred hosting vendors and get one setup before continuing.

Getting Started

After you have downloaded the theme from your customer account, you will need to upload it into WordPress.

  1. Login to your WordPress site (e.g. http://www.yoursite.com/wp-login.php) and then under the “Appearance” sidebar menu, click on “Themes”.
  2. Click on the “Add New” button at the top of page.
  3. Click the “Upload Theme” button at the top of page.
  4. Click the “Choose File” button and select the theme-name-x.x.zip file you downloaded earlier.
  5. Click “Open” or “Ok” and then click “Install Now”.
  6. After the theme is uploaded and installed, you will see a message that says “Theme Installed successfully”. Below it, click on the link “Activate” and the theme will be turned on.
Note: If you get an error message during the upload process, you will likely have to manually upload the file via SFTP. See the Uploading Your Theme Using FTP page.

Since WordPress 4.2, this is automatically enabled for you. How can you tell? Look at any pages on your website. If the url contains an ugly number at the end (e.g. http://localhost/blog/?p=123) then pretty permalinks is NOT enabled. Continue reading to set this up manually, otherwise skip onto the next step in the install guide.

Enabling pretty permalinks has several benefits. Not only does this make your urls cosmetically better, it improves your SEO. It does this by using your page or post title as part of the url. In essence, keywords are what search engines like Google love to see.

  • Go to Your WordPress admin
  • Click the “Permalink” menu under the “Settings” menu
  • Select the “Custom Structure” option and then enter in the custom structure you want to use
  • /%postname%/ equals this structure http://www.yoursite.com/blog-post-name/
  • /%postname%-%post_id%/ equals this structure http://www.yoursite.com/blog-post-name-3487/

You can use other structures as well if you prefer. We’ve put together a detailed guide on WordPress permalinks

Note: If you already have a permalink structure in place, any change should not break existing links pointing to your site (external or internal). WordPress has automatic 301 redirects which handle this for you.

If you get an error message while trying to save then just follow the instructions on the screen. This is a WordPress error message and not related to the theme. See the official WordPress Permalinks troubleshooting guide for more information.

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