 you must do these 12 tasks before you change your WordPress theme. Now, changing your theme is a bigger deal than what you think. Changing a theme can really change your site. It can change your conversions. It can change your opt-ins, all kinds of things. So there are certain steps that you're going to need to take. And I want to walk you through all these in this video so you don't have any problems and so you get the best results. Thanks so much for watching this video. Don't forget to subscribe. Hit that subscribe button down there. Turn it from red to gray. Don't forget to ring the bell. Turn on all bell notifications so you're notified each and every time I go live or if I upload a video. Yeah, changing that theme, it's not as simple as you would think. You got to go through these steps. Number one, make note of any theme customizations you've done. Maybe you've added some code. Maybe you've customized some things. All of these things have to be noted and done on the next theme. If you don't, they will not work properly. People don't think about this. Over the years, they add different things to their site. They tweak different things. They customize things. And then when they go switch to another theme, things break and your website doesn't work. We don't want that happening. Make sure you get number two, the website theme performance metrics. This is super important guys. If you don't have this, if you don't know how your site's performing, then you're not going to know if the new theme has caused things to get screwed up. There is a tool you can use. I'll put it on the screen here. Use this tool right here and you can check for free what your speed, what your loading speed of your website is. Because if it loads a whole lot slower, that's going to affect people going to your website and the performance of the website overall. This is a great website testing tool. It's called Is It WP? It's a free website speed test tool. All you have to do is enter your website and analyze the website. It's simple and easy to use. Number three, you want to make note of the current widget and sidebar theme areas. When you switch themes, sometimes these areas are in different places and that could mess them up so you want to make sure they're working properly. Number four, you want to copy existing WordPress tracking codes. A lot of times people will put their tracking codes directly into their theme and when they do so and they switch themes, they lose all that. They don't have that data anymore so you don't want that to happen. I do suggest you using Monster Insights which will help you with that. I'll put the link here on the screen and that way you won't have that issue. Here's what it looks like when you get a Monster Insights right here. It says get Monster Insights. You just click right there and you can get it and it will help you out and save you a lot of headaches. Number five, you want to backup your current WordPress website. Now, there's a lot of softwares out there that can do that but you want to find a WordPress backup plugin, install that and use that to back up your site. That way if anything goes wrong, you can always restore your site and you'll be back to where you were before. Number six, you want to put your WordPress website into maintenance mode. Really important that you do that. While making changes to your site, it's always good practice to put your website into a maintenance mode. Maintenance mode lets you display a user-friendly notice to your visitor which looks something like this. This helps prevent your visitors from seeing your website when it's half finished or under construction. I do recommend you using the C-Prod plugin. It's really the best drag and drop WordPress page builder and it's used by a lot of different people. This lets you easily create custom maintenance mode pages, landing pages, coming soon pages and 401 pages. Number seven is you want to test the functionality of the WordPress plugins that you currently have. You want to go in there and make sure everything's working. Sometimes when you switch themes that can cause things to go haywire, right? Every time you do something else breaks on a site but you want to make sure you do that so you have everything working properly. Next you want to test your new website template across different browsers and across different devices. It may be different on a tablet or on a mobile phone or on a desktop or in Firefox or Explorer or you know Chrome, whatever you're using. So you want to make sure you test it in all these areas to make sure it's working properly. Number nine, you know, while you're at it, delete any plugins that you're not using right now. All that additional stuff on your website that you're not using slows everything down. It can cause conflicts and cause the things that you do want to work to not work. Number 10, let your users know that you got a new website, that you got new stuff there. That's super important that you do that. Get in touch with your readers and tell them about your new website. This will prepare your audience so that they're not confused right by any big design changes and think they're at the wrong website and just actually leave. Here's an example of a post right here that a company shared about their new website. You can see how they did it. I recommend notifying your audience via email, newsletter, social media and push notifications. You're going to be tempted to just change themes and not do all this guys. And I want to warn you at this point, do not do that. Do not do that. Changing your website theme is a bigger deal than what you think. And I don't want you to be put off by this video. I don't want you to go, Oh my God, I'm not going to change my theme. It's too much work. You should do it. You should do it. Definitely do it. If you want to change your theme, you should definitely do it. But just be aware of all these other things that you're going to need to do. Be aware that, you know, your audience could come to the site and they could be shocked. They could be like, Oh my gosh, I'm at the wrong website. What is this? Or I don't know how to use this or where can I find stuff. Let them know you did this right to make it easier for them. So you want to prepare them when these emails you're going to send out. Now a number 11 is you want to test your loading speed. Once you've done all this, test your loading speed of your new site. And remember in the beginning I said to check your loading speed of your site and check all the data on your site. Now you can compare it to the new theme and see what the difference is. And if you need to make tweaks, if you need to make changes, if you need to correct things, now's the time you're going to want to do that. Now, if you feel uncomfortable doing any of these things, you can certainly hire somebody to help you. Be cautious. Okay. When somebody gets into your WordPress website, they can break things. And if they break things, that can be a problem. But remember we got that backup, right? We got that backup. So make sure you always have that backup. You can find help on Fiverr. You can find help on Upwork. You can find help on Freelancer.com. Just make sure whoever it is that you see their reviews, you see other jobs they did. Maybe you know somebody who's already had work done on their site. You can talk to some of your circle of friends and see if they know somebody and give you some recommendations. If you don't feel like you're up to doing this, don't do it. Okay. That's the advice I would give you. If you feel like you can't do this stuff, you feel like it's way over your head. If you feel like what I've given you in this video is more than what you could totally comprehend, don't do it. You know, you can always learn this stuff on down the road, but you can certainly get help. There's people that are very adept at doing this that do this kind of thing all the time that won't have any issues. So don't worry about it. Okay. Upwork, Fiverr, Freelancer.com, any of those sites, you can find somebody who can help you out. Number 12, you're going to want to monitor your website bounce rate. What is a bounce rate? A bounce rate is when somebody comes to your site and they immediately leave within a second or two. Now, this can have something to do with your new theme. So you want to make it as easy as possible to navigate your new theme. You can do this by making the navigation menus easier and more friendly to use. You can do this by having more internal links on your site. There's many ways you can do this to make your site have a lower bounce rate, but this is something you want to monitor. In the beginning, you initially may experience a higher bounce rate just because people come to your site and they don't recognize it, depending on how much of a change it is. If it's a huge change, you're going to see a bigger bounce rate just because they don't know where they're at. However, that may be offset by people coming to your site who are new to your site who like the new theme. So overall, maybe your new people bounce a little bit more, but you get new people coming in who actually stay on your site and become customers of your site. And at this point, once you've done all these things, you've got these 12 steps done, it's not a bad idea to survey your audience. Send out an email. Say, what did you think of our new website? Hey, if you fill out this questionnaire or five questions about the new website, I'll send you a free $49 report on how to lose weight or how to garden or how to do woodworking or whatever your niche is. Offer them something to fill out these surveys. So often, I will have a company send me a survey to let me fill out and grade their company or grade their service or whatever. And they don't want to give me anything. Well, I'm not going to do that. You know, the the odds of me feeling if I filled out every survey, every time somebody at the grocery store said, you know, circle this and says fill out the survey. If I did that every single time, I wouldn't have time to run my business. And you probably wouldn't either. So make sure if you're asking them their opinions, make sure if you're giving them a survey to do that you give them something of value for doing it, that you pay them back in some way. Hey, take my survey and here's a coupon code for 10% off your next order. That will motivate some people to do it. And then you'll get that feedback that you need to make sure that your site is operating properly. I hope this helps you out, guys. If you want some more information on digital marketing and selling online, I have a free course below. It's a $97 course. You can get it absolutely free. All you have to do is click and learn. No credit card required. Also, if you haven't done so so far, please make sure you subscribe. Hit that subscribe button. Turn it from red to gray. Don't forget to ring the bell. Turn on all bell notifications so you're notified each and every time I go live. Also, give me a thumbs up. That thumbs up is so important. As a matter of fact, let me show you what it looks like. See that thumbs up right there? Yeah, that's what it looks like. And you need to click it down there and give me that thumbs up. It helps me so much. I would really appreciate it. Thank you so much for watching this video. I appreciate you watching it and I'll see you in the next video. Hey, thanks for watching my video. 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