When you have a new WordPress website or perhaps an out of date website, changing the appearance is an important factor. Giving the website a new look and feel, changing the website name or improving menu items can all easily be done through the appearance customise wizard that lives inside the WordPress admin area.

Customise WordPress

Once you have logged into your WordPress admin panel, from the left hand side menu, mouse hover the ‘Appearance‘ menu item and select ‘Customize‘.

The customise section makes changing the WordPress appearance very easy, offering all the tools that are needed to do this as menu items. It applies the changes that you make online so you can see exactly what changes are going to happen to the site. Don’t panic though, the changes won’t be visible to any visitors until you’ve opted to save them.

Customise Menu

From the customise menu we can see:

• ‘Active Theme‘: Choose ‘Change’ to see a selection of new themes that can be added.
• ‘Site Identity‘: Change the name and tagline of your website.
• ‘Colors‘: Change the font and background colours.
• ‘Header Image‘: Set a header image.
• ‘Background Image‘: Set a background image.
• ‘Menus‘: Add or revise menu items.
• ‘Widgets‘: Change the widget area.
• ‘Static Front Page‘: Decide whether you’d like blog posts to be featured on the front page or another section.

All of these sections give you full control of changing the appearance of your WordPress website, without you needing any technical knowledge or understanding. If you’ve looking to make improvements, you may find trial and error is the best process, making small changes according to your requirements.

As an example, we would like to change the colours on the website to give it a less white feel. To do this, we selected ‘Colors‘ from the menu.

The left hand side menu now offers a variety of colour options. We’ve chosen an option from the ‘Base Color Scheme‘ to see how that effects the site look on the right.

We’ve certainly achieved a less white feel.

With the customisation now made which we are happy with, at the top of the left menu, save by selecting the option ‘Save & Publish‘. Selecting this will save the changes to the website for visitors to now see.

You can continue to make as many changes as you like. However, it’s important to understand that there’s no undo option to reverse what has been done, so it’s worth bearing that in mind. Take confidence and continue to build your website’s appearance to how you think it should be.

This article explained how to change the basic WordPress appearance to suit the theme of your website or any new requirements that you had, using the online appearance customise options.