Set up your theme

After you activate a theme on WordPress.com, set it up by customizing your homepage, pages, menus, and styles. This guide shows you how to get your site ready to publish using the Site Editor.

Activating a theme applies its design to your site right away, including the homepage design shown in the preview. If your live site still looks different from the theme preview, one of the following usually explains the difference.

Your theme’s homepage design appears only when your site is set to display your latest posts. To check this setting, follow these steps:

1. Visit your site’s dashboard.
2. Navigate to Settings → Reading.
3. Under the “Your homepage displays” section, select the “Your latest posts” option.
4. Click the “Save Changes” button.

Despite the name, “Your latest posts” tells your site to use your theme’s Front Page template, which is the homepage design that came with the theme. To use one of your own pages as the homepage instead, learn how to set a static homepage.

Add the theme’s patterns to build pages that match the theme preview. Patterns are the pre-designed sections the demo content is built from. The theme showcase displays each theme filled with the designer’s demo content, but that demo content loads only on brand new sites during setup. An established site keeps the pages and posts you already have.

To add a pattern to your homepage, follow these steps:

1. Visit your site’s dashboard.
2. Navigate to Appearance → Editor.
3. Click the homepage preview on the right to open it in the Site Editor.
4. Click the + block inserter at the top left of the editor.
5. Select the Patterns tab.
6. Find your theme’s name in the list of pattern categories, then click a pattern to add it to your page.
7. Replace the sample text and images with your own, then click Save.

If your theme has no pattern category of its own, browse the other ready-made patterns in the Patterns tab.

Learn how to customize your pages with starter content or use block patterns.

Template edits you made under a previous theme stay on your site and display instead of the new theme’s design. Resetting the template restores the design that came with your current theme. Learn how to reset a template, or see the homepage troubleshooting guide for more homepage fixes.

You most likely selected the theme you activated due to how the homepage’s design looked. You can quickly replace the sample content of the homepage with your own text and images through the Site Editor. You can also remove any unwanted content and add fresh elements using blocks or patterns.

1. Visit your site’s dashboard.
2. Navigate to Appearance → Editor.
3. Click the preview on the right to open the homepage in the Site Editor.

Begin by exploring the blocks on your homepage through the List View option to understand their layout and function:

Here are a few of the most common blocks used to design the homepage template:

• Query Loop block: Used to display the latest blog post entries. You can customize the design of the Query Loop block that automatically pulls in the contents of your posts.
• Group block: A container block that groups other blocks together into sections for you to organize and design.
• Columns: Display content in multiple columns, with blocks added to each column.
• Headings: Introduce new sections and organize content to help visitors (and search engines) understand the structure of your content.
• Spacers: Add white space between blocks and customize its height.
• …and many more blocks.

Learn more about how to edit the default homepage.

Once you’re happy with your homepage, you can create additional pages on your site, such as an About, Contact, or Blog page. To create a new page for your site, follow these steps:

1. Visit your site’s dashboard.
2. Navigate to Appearance → Editor.
3. Click Pages.
4. Click the “Add New Page” button.
5. Give the new page a name and add your content.
6. Once you have published the new page, you can add the page to your site’s menu.

You can also customize the design of your page templates, including the headers and footers, colors, and general layout. Learn more about editing templates.

Your site’s layout is made up of several parts, including the site styles, menus, headers and footers. All of these parts come together to create templates.