Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links. I may receive compensation when you click on links to products in this post. For an explanation of my Advertising Policy, visit this page. Thanks for reading!
How customizable is WordPress?
WordPress can be customised in many ways, all depending on the extent to which you want your website to look, feel and function. WordPress includes powerful theme customization settings, plugins, real-time CSS Editors, even a built-in WordPress Customizer, all easily accessible and built right into it’s convenient dashboard.
WordPress is also 100% open source, so you can not only customize it in any way you like, but you can also view all the source code and edit it any way you want as well. In addition, anything you build with WordPress is yours to keep and host anywhere you like!
WordPress is so customizable in fact, that your ability to customize WordPress is only limited by your imagination.
Take WordPress themes for example. They can be customized in many ways to get your theme to look and feel how you want it. Here are some other examples of how customizable WordPress is:
- WordPress has customizer settings built into their themes dashboards.
- Thousands of themes, which are all customizable.
- Thousands of Plugins for functionality customizations.
- Built in CSS Editors.
- It’s Open Source so you can view all the source code and edit it any way you like.
- Add new users.
- Change the color scheme of your website .
- Alter the typography and text sizes.
- Move sections of the site around such as the search and navigation bars.
- Add or delete columns, border sizes, headers, footers, even the entire site layout.
- And much more…
In this post, I will talk about just how customizable WordPress is as well as how you can customize your WordPress site into something you can be proud of.
Do I need coding skills to customize my WordPress site?
I’m not going to lie. If you have coding skills, especially in PHP and JavaScript, the ability to customize your WordPress site will only be limited to your coding skills.
However, where does that leave us non-coders? Well, the good news is, there is plenty of customization that you as a non-coder can do to your WordPress website. How?
By customizing your theme. You can customize the design, how your pages are formatted, your headers and footers as well as your columns.
You can customize the spacing between your columns as well as paragraphs. You can also customize your fonts and colors.
Even the very functionality of your WordPress website is customizable through the use of plugins.
In fact, there are well over 50,000 WordPress plugins available on WordPress.org. All of them have free versions. Actually any plugin listed on WordPress.org must be free.
Now that does not mean that those plugins do not offer paid or pro versions. Most do.
That’s of course how they pay for the development of these plugins. So many plugin developers will offer a free version.
Many times the free version of a plugin is all you need to customize certain aspects of your WordPress website. The same goes with themes.
All themes offered on WordPress.org are free versions. However, most themes also have paid versions.
Well, what is the difference between a paid version of a theme or plugin and the free version of the same theme or plugin?
Well, access to support is one. The other major difference between a free theme or plugin and the paid versions are your ability to customize them as well as additional functionality and options.
Therefore, it is crucial that you choose your theme very carefully.
As far as the plugins are concerned, this is a little easier since plugins are designed to add a specific function to your WordPress website.
So in my opinion, paid versions of plugins are usually just a bonus.
If you cannot find the basic function you are looking for in the free version, then in my opinion, you shouldn’t go for the paid version.
All free plugins should offer the minimal functionality that you are looking for and as they advertise.
However, that’s not to say that paid versions of plugins are not worth the money. Many times, they are well worth the money and even more.
So before you pay for a plugin or the paid version, explore carefully and ask questions.
Why should you customize your WordPress site?
If you want just a simple blog, then there’s not much customization you need to do to your WordPress blog or site.
However, if you want to make your WordPress blog or website uniquely you and give it all the functionalities that you would like to make available to your readers and users, then customizing your WordPress website is the way to go.
You could take even the most basic of themes and functionality and turn it into a truly unique experience for your visitors both visually and interactively.
By customizing your theme you will give personality, your personality, to your WordPress website or blog.
Even if your WordPress site is used for business reasons, you can really show off the image of your company, your business as well as your products and services by customizing your WordPress website.
In fact, if you have a business you will definitely want to customize your WordPress website so that it can best showcase your products and services.
To go even further, you may want to add a blog to your corporate website.
A blog is a great way to keep your visitors both clients and potential clients, up to date with the latest trends in your industry.
Additionally, you can also let your clients and visitors know the latest news about your company.
Perhaps you want to let them know of new products and services that you’re coming out with as well as other changes to your company.
By also adding a blog, you’ll give your potential clients and customers a place where they can find out useful information, place orders and reach out to you for your company’s products or services.
There are many reasons why you would want to customize your WordPress website whether that’s for personal or business reasons.
Are WordPress Plugins customizable?
All WordPress Plugins are customizable to a point.
Many plugin developers will add extra functions and short-codes that could be added to their plugins for customization. Whereas others do not.
If you are a non-coder, the best you can hope for is that the plugins that you are interested in, have some sort of customization possibilities.
In fact, many times the paid versions of plugins are often more customizable than free versions.
However, if you are a coder, then of course you will be able to tweak and customize most plugins that you are interested in since WordPress is after all open source.
In fact, you can find many customizations for WordPress plugins on some popular developer forms like GitHub.com or StackOverflow.com etc.
Even the WordPress community on WordPress.org will often talk about customizations and leave various coding solutions to customize certain plugins in WordPress.org’s support forums.
However, you always need to be careful when customizing a plugin with your own coding solutions. Why?
First, any changes to WordPress plugins can result in the malfunction of other WordPress plugins.
In addition, whenever plugins and themes are updated, any customizations you have made may be null and void at best, or those customizations may actually cause havoc within your WordPress website, if that particular plugin is updated.
If you like to have customizations that are not included in a particular plugin, you should always contact the developer of that plugin. Perhaps they may be able to add it for you if it’s not much trouble.
Or they can actually give you a code snippet to add into the plugin as well.
Many developers are quite open to new ideas on how they can improve their plugins, so they may use your suggestions and update their plugins with your customization suggestions for example.
Can you customize a free WordPress theme?
WordPress free themes can also be customizable.
However, you will find most free themes are very limited with their customizable options.
Most free themes will require you to buy the paid or pro version of their theme in order to access all their customizable options.
However, paid or premium themes like GeneratePress are really quite affordable.
You can get a GeneratePress theme including support and updates for under $60. The yearly renewals are about half that price.
However, the renewals keep your theme up to date and gives you access to their support as well as their forums.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve contacted their support with little questions and they’ve always been very prompt and have given me very clear and understandable solutions to whatever issues I may have had.
In addition, their support forum is a treasure trove of all kinds of information and ideas on customizing their theme.
The support forum is actually very active for a simple theme forum. The developer Tom Usborne is also quite active in the forum as well.
Having the creator of any WordPress theme be personally active in their theme’s forum is more uncommon that you may think. This is because many themes are made by development teams for big companies, then sold on large online marketplaces.
So your chances of interacting with the developer themselves are quite low.
This is where Tom Usborne and the team at GeneratePress really shine.
Using WordPress’s own built in theme customizer.
To customize your theme including colors, fonts, spacing between paragraphs and columns as well as customizing your headers and footers, along with many many more customization options for your WordPress theme, can be accessed through the Customize section on your dashboard.
Customize Menus and Widgets on your WordPress website.
You can not only customize your WordPress theme as well as your plugins to a certain degree, but you can also arrange the Menus and place them where you think is most appealing.
You can also organize the posts and pages of your WordPress website as well as add other functionalities through the use of Widgets.
The Widgets in WordPress are also drag and drop meaning you just click, hold and drag the the widget in the section and position to where you want it to be shown on your website.
WordPress is as customizable as you want it to be. Summary.
As you can see, WordPress is very customizable. The only limits will be your imagination as well as your coding skills.
Although WordPress has become much more non-coder-friendly over the years as it has evolved, knowing some coding will definitely give you an advantage in customizing your WordPress website.
Though non-coders can benefit from customization by customizing their WordPress website themselves as I have gone over above.
Everything you need is either in your WordPress dashboard or can be uploaded to your WordPress dashboard.
In addition, to the methods of customizing your WordPress website that I’ve mentioned above, you also have page builders that you can use. Some come included with themes themselves, like the Divi theme and page builder.
Others are standalone page builders like Beaver Builder and Elementor.
In recent years, WordPress has become even more customizable with the introduction of their own page builder called Gutenberg.
So whether you are a coder or a non-coder, you will find that WordPress is very customizable and has something for everyone.
