If your website is a WordPress site, this one’s for you. The Twenty Twenty-Five theme has an update this morning. If your website is set to automatically update themes then you probably don’t need to do anything (but you should keep reading anyway).
Unused themes that need an update pose a security risk to your website (as does anything out of date on there). It’s like leaving your back door wide open while you go off for a two week holiday in Benidorm. Unless you have two Belgian Mals I wouldn’t reccomend it.
If you are updating your unused themes when it prompts you to….why? That’s like putting a saucer of milk out for the cat when you don’t own a cat. Yes, it’s a 30 second job, but it’s still pretty pointless.
So, let’s delete the themes you’re not using. But hold on….you shouldn’t delete ALL your unused themes… It’s always best to keep one extra theme. You may need to test or troubleshoot issues that might arise further down the line and a spare theme is good for this. This should be the latest theme available (Twenty Twenty-Five – unless you’re reading this in the future then it will be a newer one). Of course, if Twenty Twenty-Five is your active theme, then keep hold of Twenty Twenty-Four as your spare unused theme.
So, should you only ever have two themes on your WordPress site? Well that depends. If you’re using a child theme (which, unless you’re using a bespoke theme, you should be using a child theme) you will need to have three themes installed.
- Your active child theme
- A spare unused theme (eg – Twenty Twenty-Five)
- The parent theme (your child theme won’t work without it)
That’s it. A maximum of three themes on your WordPress site. Now you can go ahead and delete the others. One last thing before you run off and do this though…
As with making any changes on your website, always make a back-up first. It’s just common sense (unless you live for those “oh shiiiiiit!” moments – you’re the type that likes to go sky diving and bungee jumping aren’t you?).
Not only is this good from a security point of view, you’ll be saving some space on your server.
How do you delete a WordPress theme?
Someone asked me how to delete a theme in WordPress so I’ve thrown this together really quickly (like you couldn’t tell…). I will expand on this later, but for now…
Log in to your websites backend and look for Appearance/Themes in the left hand menu.
On the next page that comes up – click on the theme you want to delete. Make sure you’re keeping a spare theme though.
The final step? You just need to hit that “delete” button at the bottom.
That’s all you need to do!
But if you’re on my WordPress Care Plan you don’t need to worry about any of this as I take care of it for you 😉