Most Prevalent WordPress Theme Mistakes and How to Rectify Them

WordPress themes enhance your website’s beauty. WordPress encompasses both free and paid themes in its repository. Most of them are powered by What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) editor. This editor assists the users to check the changes live while configuring. Almost, there are 4000+ free licensed Themes for WordPress; you can get the free themes in the WordPress theme directory. Several themes can be accessed from third-party vendors as well.

Submitting the theme to WordPress. org theme directory is the best way to share the work and show some contribution to the WordPress community. But, before theme submission, it is essential to know the review process on a priority basis. As it helps you to find out if the theme is able to fulfill the requirements, if it is not, then you can reject it at the same time. There are several forum posts commenced every day not only on WordPress.org but also on other forums. Instead, most of the theme developers support.

Several companies are there that provide WordPress theme customization services that suit your business requirements and expand the functionality. But, it is also advised to choose the company wisely. Do not let yourself feel cheated after spending money.

So, if you want to save yourself from all those WordPress theme issues, then keep on reading this write-up. We assure you that at the end of this article, most of your issues will get resolved.

If the activated theme is the same as the demo, then it is great. But, if after installing the theme, the website is not the same as the theme demo then you need to get a solution for that. For your convenience, we have gathered the two solutions for you.

Solution 1

The wrong reading settings error means that the theme either needs the home page to get set or you need to set your website.

To do that: move to Settings-> Reading and review the choices in the Front Page Displays. If the theme does not need the page template for the homepage layout, then set this option to “Your latest posts”. If the theme has the homepage template, then set your page to use the static home page.

Solution 2

You have to use the homepage template. The theme developers consider the custom page templates for the homepage layout. For that, you need to go through the documentation files. Besides, if there is any head-on then make a new page.

Navigate to the editor in the Page Attributes -> Template check to view if there is a Home, Front-page, Homepage, or similar template. If there is, then make a page with this template and then, save and publish it and then, move to Settings->Readings to manage it as the static front page option.

You just purchased and downloaded an excellent theme, then installed it and witnessed the below message:

Yes, it is probable that the zip file you have does not include the style.css file.  Besides, there is a possibility that you have not uploaded the root theme folder.

Solution

Find the folder on the desktop where you own the theme, and then open it (if compressed, unzip and open it). Soon, after opening, you should view every file in it, if you do not, then the theme may be in a subdirectory.

For instance, in general, advanced themes have themes in the “installable themes” folder. Usually, it is obvious that the actual theme folder may be named as similar as the theme. After finding it, compress it and upload it with WordPress, or then upload the unzipped folder by FTP.

Generally, the default WordPress URL structure is not as appealing as it has to be and is not SEO friendly at all. Therefore, when you set the website URL for the first time, it may seem ugly (a total mesh of postdate, post title, post ID, and categories,etc.). But, this can be fixed easily.

Solution

Therefore, if the URL does not look perfect (yourwebsite.com/?p=1), just move to Settings->Permalink. Amend the setting to the Post Name option.

** Choose the one that you think is best**

You have installed the theme, and soon you want to upload a sample .xml file. The theme developer here gives you the file, but with some errors.

Solution 1

The import error “failure” is generally because of one or two things. The first one is that it may try to load taxonomies or posts from those custom post types that do not exist.

• Activate Theme: Assure that the theme you want to consider is active.
• Double Check Theme: Assure that the theme has the custom taxonomies and post types. You can ask the developer if you do not have any idea of the same.

Solution 2

For an error that says “Failed to import media”, also means that the image was not downloaded

Have you checked the box for importing the attachments? We recommend that before importing, you need to examine the box that says “Download and import file attachments.”

Find out if you can access the images? Maybe- you cannot access the image from the server. You can open the sample data from the text editor, and then attempt to find the files and examine the link from the browser. However, the simplest way may be to reach the theme developer and tell them that the picture has not been downloaded.

Versions before WordPress 2.9 do not have thumbnail (feature image) assistance in WordPress. Hence, several themes considered custom fields or meta-options to determine feature images. The possibility is this as well that they do not have any default images.

Therefore, maybe you are shifting from an existing theme to the new theme that does not hold the featured images. Or, the existing theme was simply a small theme and you did not use that. You do not need to spend many hours looking after hundreds of posts for setting the featured image. Here, we are giving you a solution that you must adopt. It is nothing but a plugin.

Solution

There is no better solution than using the Easy Add Thumbnail plugin. This plugin set automatically the featured images on the existing posts. All you need is to install->active->follow the guidelines to integrate the images to the existing posts. Do not forget to include the featured images while publishing the posts.

Now, you have the solutions to the most prevalent WordPress theme mistakes. We have mentioned the common ones.  Always keep in mind that the theme requirements are built with the user in mind.  The themes that fail to satisfy the user’s needs are obviously not adopted by any.

So, we hope that you liked this piece of article. If you have some queries related, then let us know in the comment section below. Also, suggestions are always welcome. Thanks for reading!!