Themes. They are what makes your site look great! This week I’m in the middle of migrating a site from one server to another and the question came up as to how many themes was ok to have in your install.
Welcome to the very first edition of 2 Minute Tuesday!
I get it, you want to try out different themes to see how your site looks – that’s great! Themes can do a lot for you, just out of the box. When you move from one theme to another, each theme is stored in on your server.
When it comes to loading your website, the browser will look for the active theme and just load that – so from a load time point of view, there’s no issue.
However, each of those theme files take up room on your server. Each one of those themes also needs to be regularly updated, no matter if you are using them or not.
So the “almost” best answer would be to delete all the other themes you are not using.
The catch is that if you have an issue with your current theme, the browser will automatically load the next theme. So I always keep one inactive theme there just in case.
There’s another catch. If you are using what is called a “child theme”, it’s going to rely on a “parent theme”. In the sites that I build they are all built on WordPress with the Genesis Framework. That means there’s a theme called Genesis that is required for the theme I’m using on your site to work. In this case you would want to keep both the active theme and the Genesis (Parent) theme and delete the rest.
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Oh, Hat Tip to my friend Jeremy for the inspiration of this new series!
He's an avid hockey fan, rides a mountain bike, sometimes rides a road bike, has a few motorcycles (he had a really fast one, bought a cool orange one, rode a really slow one, and now,a perfect "BDR Weapon"). If that isn't enough, he makes cheese and sourdough bread, loves strong beer and good red wine, and poorly plays the Mandolin.
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