How to Upload Theme to WordPress Step by Step Guide

upload theme to wordpress featured imageOne of the most common questions about creating a WordPress site is how to upload theme to WordPress after downloading it from the WordPress repo or from a marketplace like ThemeForest. For advanced WordPress users, this is basic but for complete WordPress beginners, it’s an important question. To upload them to the WordPress site is simple and takes a few minutes and does not require you to be a WordPress pro.

In fact, anyone who can download and upload and email attachment can comfortably upload the theme to WordPress and activate it. In this quick guide, I will show you a step by step approach on how to upload a WordPress theme to your site and activate it.

Ways to Upload Theme to WordPress

There are three ways you can use to upload the theme to WordPress and they include  :

  • Uploading WordPress theme on dashboard
  • Uploading WordPress theme via FTP
  • Uploading WordPress theme on Hosting Cpanel
  • Uploading WordPress theme via SSH / Command Prompt / Terminal

All these four ways achieve the same objective but use different approaches. I will explain the first three methods in details, the last one is advanced and is only suitable for WordPress developer or advanced users.

Before Uploading WordPress Theme

Before you consider uploading a WordPress theme it is important you read the documentation of the theme. Secondly, unzip the folder since some themes are packaged with other files that should not be uploaded.

Example, when you download a theme from a marketplace like ThemeForest, it’s highly likely its bundled together with documentation or other files. First, unzip the theme folder and ensure it only contains the required theme files.

WordPress Themes Folder

It is also important to understand that all the WordPress themes are contained in a folder in the root of WordPress installation that has this path – wp-content/themes/

No matter the location of WordPress installation both local or remote the themes on your site will be contained in this folder. This is an important tip when you are uploading a WordPress theme through the CPanel or the FTP. Now we can get started uploading the WordPress theme.

Theme Reviews and Preview

Before you upload the theme you need to look at the reviews to learn the experience of other users with the theme. Looking at the reviews will save you lots of headaches in future especially when buying a premium theme. You should also carefully check the demos and previews to see if they fit your requirements.

Download WordPress Theme

download WordPress theme for free

You need to have a theme to upload, you can get both free and premium WordPress theme from the official repository.

For this tutorial, I have searched for the popular free themes on the repo and picked one named ‘Hello Elementor’ that we will use for demonstration. Click on the download button to download the WordPress theme:

download wordpress theme free

Upload Theme to WordPress on Dashboard

This is the most common way of uploading a WordPress theme on your site. You need to have access to the dashboard and you also need to have the admin rights. So begin by logging into your WordPress site to access the dashboard :

upload wordpress theme login first

If you have the access to the administrator account, log in and click on the Appearance menu on the main dashboard menu. Under the Appearance menu there is a Themes submenu, click on this menu to begin uploading your theme.

add theme to wordpress

You can now upload the theme by clicking on the Add New button or the Add New theme placeholder as shown on the image above. You will be redirected to the theme upload screen that has an upload button at the top as shown below :

upload wordpress theme button

Click on this Upload Theme button and you will be prompted to select and upload the theme you downloaded in the earlier step.upload wordpress theme

Click on the zip file to select then upload using the Install Now button as shown in the image below :

install wordpress theme after downloading

You will have successfully uploaded the theme to your WordPress site after this step and you will see the confirmation through this screen shown below :

upload theme to wordpress success

This is the simplest and easiest way to upload theme to WordPress for beginners. For advanced WordPress users,  we can explore the two other ways to upload themes to WordPress through the FTP and CPanel.

Upload Theme to WordPress on CPanel (Hostgator Example)

Let’s begin by uploading WordPress theme through the CPanel. For the demonstration, the site I am using is hosted on Hostgator and we will use the Hostgator CPanel to demonstrate.

Although we are using Hostgator CPanel, most of the other hosting companies have the same CPanel structure so the procedure will be very similar. So begin by logging into the CPanel :

login into cpanel to upload wordpress theme

From the main screen locate the public/HTML folder icon or the Files folder to access the site where you will upload the theme. The name of the files folder is commonly File Manager as shown in the image below:

Open the root installation of your WordPress site and look for the wp-content/themes folder where we will upload the WordPress theme.

upload theme via cpanel

Click on the upload button and choose the theme zip folder to begin uploading the WordPress theme.

wordpress theme upload

When the upload is successful, you should go to your site dashboard where you will see the new theme has been added and you can now activate it from the dashboard.

successfully uploaded wordpress theme

Upload Theme to WordPress via FTP

File client transfer protocol is the fastest and easiest way to upload theme to WordPress. You should have the FTP logins that you create from your hosting CPanel :

create ftp account to upload wordpress theme

Login in to your FTP account using the FTP software like Filezilla. Locate the remote site wp-content/themes folder where you will upload the WordPress theme :

wordpress upload theme via FTP

Locate the local folder where the theme you downloaded is and drag it to the theme folder in the remote site and wait for the upload of the theme to be completed.

upload theme via ftp

When the upload of WordPress theme is complete visit your site dashboard to activate the theme. We have finally come to the end of our guide, I hope you find this article useful and if you have further questions you may feel free to get in touch.