WordPress is a versatile content management system that allows you to execute various activities to improve and modify the appearance of your site. Being used by one in every six websites in the world, it is flexible enough to let you modify themes, templates, styles, sidebars and many more sections systematically, including the utilization of multiple themes for different pages on your site. This is possible through the integration of a plugin with a technical procedure.
In this tutorial, we’d like to discuss how to use multiple themes for different WordPress pages to enhance the appearance of your site. Jonradio Multiple Themes is a recommended plugin which can help you get the desired effect.
What Should You Do Before Trying?
Before beginning with the actual procedure, you must create a backup of your WordPress site to eliminate any possibility of data loss and destroy. There are some instances when you fail to see the changes. The reason lies in that caching plugins have old version of pages displayed. Thus, the way to avoid this circumstance is to turn off caching plugins. Make sure that all the WordPress cache plugins, such as WP Super Cache, have been disabled.
Now, you should install the desired themes on your site. Upon installation, you can activate the themes one-by-one.
Use Jonradio Multiple Themes Plugin
This plugin is an appearance enhancement tool for WordPress sites. This tool enables you to use different themes on your site’s pages and posts individually. Alternatively, you can also use a theme for all pages and another theme for all posts. In addition to this, a distinguished theme can be applied to the homepage for better presentation of the site.
Even, if you have a series of posts in a specific category and you want to highlight their presences to the visitors, you can simply apply an attractive theme to the posts of that category. This plugin is compatible with all the websites running on WordPress versions higher than v3.4.
How to set up the plugin to use multiple themes in WordPress
To start with, you should install and activate the plugin on your admin panel. Once the plugin is activated, you should navigate to the Appearance tab of your WordPress dashboard and select Multiple Themes plugin. Here, you can find the detailed information about this plugin, from which each section is explained precisely.
First of all, you can activate a theme for your homepage. For this, you need to scroll down the Settings page of this plugin, and find the Site Home option. Then, select a theme from the offered drop down menu. After choosing your preferred one that is already installed, do not forget to click on Save All Changes button upon selection.
Now, you can assign a specific theme for some posts or webpages based on URL, URL Prefix and URL Prefix with Asterisk. For instance, if you want all your posts that have the permalink of https://yourdomainname.com/category1/ use the Twenty Fifteen theme, you can check the box before “URL Prefix”, choose this theme from the drop down list, and enter https://your domainname.com/category1/ in the following blank space.
Even, you can activate a theme on pages by entering a query keyword. Here, you only need to select a theme and enter a keyword. Then, this plugin can search your posts and pages for that query keyword, and can apply that chosen theme on all these webpages.
Sometimes, you may want to assign different themes to the posts and pages separately. In this way, you can go the Advanced Settings of this plugin. Then, you can find an option named as “For All Pages and/or Posts”. From here, you can choose and set two themes for your posts and pages individually with great ease.
Limitations of using jonradio Multiple Themes
A possibility exists that you cannot run plugin jonradio Multiple Themes successfully due to the compatibility issues. If themes or plugins don’t work with this plugin, ZATZLabs Forums is a place where you may find the solutions. Or, the support team will give you a timely reply through the ticket.
Generally speaking, the effective solution is to have multiple separate sites whose themes can be totally different. Here is a guide on how to enable multisite network feature in WordPress. This is the case where you have no need to rely on jonradio Multiple Themes.