What's in a Theme?
Published on June 11, 2015
Published on Wealthy Affiliate — a platform for building real online businesses with modern training and AI.
Unfortunately, I am being serious.
What is in a theme? We don't even know and it is so difficult to know the good one's from the bad. I am not just talking about appearance but in how they function and reliability.
For the past month, I was using a theme called Indie and upgraded to Indie Pro. Things were going along brilliantly, in fact, I was not even concerned that I had nothing of interest to blog about here at WA.
However, because of the Indie Pro theme by Template Express everything changed.
First, on my Disability site last month I ended up with my site being hacked. The problem was with the theme, but the theme producers refused to believe that it was possible for their creation to get hacked.
Hacking of themes, apparently is unheard of and it never happens! Well, I can say from experience that it does happen. I changed my theme and life went back to normal.
Having completed the Certification Course a few weeks back, I have been working on my new site to promote WA by studying in Bootcamp.
I NEED MY HEAD EXAMINING
You would have thought that I would have learned a lesson after what happened with my previous site, but no.
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I used Indie Pro for my new site :(.
LAST NIGHT
Things have been going fine with the theme until last night. Read what happened in my blog from last night. https://my.wealthyaffiliate.com/2laurent4/blog/not...
THE NIGHTMARE
The nightmare of my disappearing website was due to the Indie Pro theme. It somehow made my site vanish into cyberspace and locked me out. I could not login or see my site on any device that I looked on.
I did all the usual things of clearing browser cache and looking on other devices. I could not reload a backup because I had this set to weekly and it was not due to backup my site until Sunday.
Of course, panic set in and I did shed a few tears :(.
BACK TO NORMAL
Luckily we have an awesome technical support team who can work miracles when things go wrong. My knights in shining armour came to my rescue and now everything is back to normal.
MORAL OF THIS LONG STORY
Be careful which themes you use and as I said there is no way of knowing which are good and which should not be touched with a barge pole.
Backup your site on a daily basis, not weekly as you never know when disaster can strike.
https://my.wealthyaffiliate.com/2laurent4/blog/wha...
Stay safe and learn from my bad experiences.
UPDATE
Following a brilliant idea from TanjaRita I have looked at how Wordpress deem themes to be safe.
Here is the link: https://make.wordpress.org/themes/handbook/review/
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