Migrating to a new theme – Time? Cost?

In general, dropping a new theme on to an existing site is pretty easy. You may have to re-arrange widgets, if the new theme uses different names for its sidebars (but the now-unused widgets will be available with all their settings). Similarly, if the new theme uses different names for its menu locations, you may have to drop in to appearances->menus and assign existing menus to the correct locations. Other than that, it should be cool.

With this caveat, however: If your theme does un-themelike things like create custom post types or it uses a custom layout for the home page, you may have to re-work that content. And, if your theme includes a page builder, you may be in a hole.

Give it a try. You can always flip back to the old theme.

At a minimum, it’s a half hour or so. At a maximum, it depends.

Ask any bidders for a detailed statement of what they need to do (and suggestions on themes, etc.)

• This reply was modified 3 years, 10 months ago by Steven Stern (sterndata).
• This reply was modified 3 years, 10 months ago by Steven Stern (sterndata).

Hi @asimpkins

I always find comments like this very curious :

> so I wouldn’t imagine this to be a lot of work, but I don’t really know

I’m not sure how we got here in the web development space.
If you don’t know, you don’t know. Since I know nothing about cars, I would never drop off my car with the mechanic, and then say to him – “I know nothing about cars, but it is definitely not running right, but it can’t take you that long to fix it right?“.

Anyway – I digress.

You are welcome to post these requests here :
https://jobs.wordpress.net/
If you want to get a real quote, I would expect a detailed requirements document to be included. And/or username and password to access the production site.
There are lots of ways to build a site – but data migration can snowball if the content has not been input well-formed.

Thank you for your replies.

The company website was dropped on me (a Marketing Manager) when our Web Design/Developer left, so while I’m able to create/edit posts and pages, my WordPress knowledge seems to drop significantly from there.

One of the estimates I received for the work was just over 100 hours (mostly on programming and testing) at a fee of $13K, which is why I’m reaching out here to see if that is reasonably or totally off.

As was said earlier “it depends”. Significantly.
13k is reasonable – especially if you are looking at Vancouver prices!

How is the content stored ?
Did you use a page builder ?
Is there markup (HTML) mixed into your content ?
Are you using custom fields to store content ?
Are there integration points between :
https://store.cle.bc.ca/
and :
https://online.cle.bc.ca/Account/Login
Do you rely on Categories and Tags ?
https://www.cle.bc.ca/louis-riel-day/
How is the left hand menu built and populated :
https://www.cle.bc.ca/courses-on-demand/

It goes on and on and on. I can spend more time on Client Discovery meetings than I do actually doing the work.
How much can we automate ?
How much will need to be manually transferred ?

FYI – I’ve had many clients where after Discovery, we ended up in a place where it was clear to just do a content audit, re-build the site and only move the content and files you want. Renovations are always more effort than starting from scratch – mostly bc you don’t know what you’re getting yourself into! Lol

One thing to factor in is that you probably do not want this done on a live site, so the developer needs to build a staging site and, when done, migrate it back to production.

And it’s almost certain that there will be design changes, plus the “theme out of the box” is probably not going to be just right, especially when you recall the arguments that went on for hours over which hue of green was just right. :-). Stuff will come out of the woodwork on this, so budget for it, or make an up-front decision that there will be minimal or no customization beyond what is built into the new theme.

– create a staging space for your site
– export the content of your production site using the WordPress export tools
– import that file(s) into your staging site
– download and activate “some themes you like” and see what happens.

Thanks. I think even what you suggest is going beyond my WordPress expertise, so I will continue to seek out some external help.

I appreciate your time and responses!

Try https://localwp.com. This free tool lets you set up a local WP site in minutes, and you can export (TOOLS->EXPORT) from your old site and then import into the local site (TOOLS->IMPORT).

OK. Thanks, Steven. I will check that out!