Step 7: How to Change the Look and Feel of Your WordPress Theme

Okay, for the following stage in our WordPress tutorial, let’s use your new theme to customize the look and feel of your site.

Hestia and Orbit Fox were chosen for this tutorial because they provide a lot of possibilities and are simple to customize.

If you choose a different theme, such as Divi (which is the best, but only available as a premium option) or a different customization plugin, such as Elementor (which is also a winner when it comes to WordPress customization), you’ll have a lot of similar options, but some may be different or missing.

Return to your actual WordPress site by clicking your website name and the “Visit Site” link at the top of the dashboard to begin tweaking your theme.

Once you’ve arrived, click the “Customize” button at the top of the page to begin customizing.

Bam, the website changes to show all the cool stuff Hestia includes by default.

This is how our site will seem, excluding the stock graphics and text, as well as the small pencil buttons.

And we’re going to make everything even better!

All of the elements in the left-hand menu are controls for changing your theme; these will be present in any WordPress theme (though different themes will give you some different options here).

But with Hestia, all you have to do to edit anything on your website is click one of the little pencil icons next to it – something not every theme has, but it’s clearly “WordPress for beginners” friendly, which is why we love it.

All we have to do now is click the small blue icon to alter the title or header image:

That’ll open up the options on the left side to make those changes.

So if we change our title here to “Beginner WordPress Tutorials,” it’ll instantly be updated on the page!

Once you’ve made a few changes you’ll want to save your work, just like we used to do for those grade school English papers (this is very arguably more important than lol).

The “Publish” button at the top of the left sidebar will save your page changes and make them live on the internet, go for that if you want.

But, if you’re not quite ready to show your work to the world, click that little gear icon next to the Publish button.

Click “Save Draft”

When you click the Publish button, your changes will be saved as a draft, but they will not be visible on your live site.

Let’s swap out the image in our header (that’s the portion behind the page title we modified previously) now that we’re safe from the “internet is down” devils.

In the sidebar, look for that image.

Click “Remove” then “Select Image” when it appears once the image is removed.

From here, you can upload your own images by dragging/dropping them or clicking the button to search the files on your computer.

Upload an image, click on the “Choose Image” once it’s been uploaded, and boom

Now let’s say we don’t want the words of our title right in the middle, just click on the “Extra” tab in the sidebar.

And you’ll get some layout options to move this over to the left, right, or middle.

If you want to change the color of the button underneath our website title, click the back arrow twice to get out of the customization settings for this section:

Then go down to “Appearance Settings,” then “Colors.”

And you can change that pink accent color to whatever you want. We do love blue!

Now let’s change our fonts and font sizes, click that same back button again to get out of the Color settings and go to “Typography.”

Here you’ll get options to change the “font family” for your headings and body text (that’s the text that’s not super big in the titles).

As well as your font sizes when you click on the, you guessed it, “Font Size” tab.

Table of Contents

• The first step is to obtain a domain name and web hosting.
• Step 2: Installing WordPress
• Step 3: Using WordPress to Login
• Step 4: How to Use the WordPress Admin Panel
• Step 5: Putting WordPress Themes Into Place
• Step 6: How to Install WordPress Plugins
• Step 7: How to Change the Look and Feel of Your WordPress Theme
• Step 8: Adding Pages to WordPress
• Step 9: How to make a WordPress blog post
• Step 10: Creating WordPress Menus
• Step 11: Putting Your WordPress Site Online
• Step 12: How to speed up WordPress
• Step 13: Enable gzip compression for WordPress
• Step 14: How to Make Your WordPress Site More Secure
• Step 15: How to update your WordPress site
• Step 16: How do you backup your WordPress site
• Website tips and tricks for WordPress
• Now that you can build your own personal website