When migrating to our theme and plugin setup, we’re often asked if everything can be done in one step. While that may sound ideal, making too many complex changes at once can lead to hard-to-diagnose issues and significant setbacks.
In reality, this process is made up of several separate projects. Unless you’re working with a custom developer (typically $5,000–$20,000), these steps need to be completed in smaller, manageable phases.
We only provide support for Phase 2 (theme & plugin) outlined below.
Before you do anything
Use a staging site
We recommend completing your theme and Feast Plugin setup on a staging site.
Once your staging site is created, avoid making changes on your live site. When staging is pushed live, it will completely replace your live site, and any updates made there in the meantime will be lost.
A theme and plugin setup is a significant project on its own. To reduce the risk of issues, avoid adding additional changes during this process, such as customizations, reorganizing categories, or removing tags. After your new setup is live, wait at least 4 weeks before making any other major updates.
We can't stress this enough: Push your staging site live as soon as the migration is complete. Any content, design, or structural changes should be done after the new setup is live, not during the migration process.
Jump to:
Phase 1
Prerequisites
(do these before touching the theme)
Self-Hosted WordPress
Before getting started, your site must be on a self-hosted WordPress setup (not the free version of WordPress.com).
We do not offer migrations from platforms like Wix or Squarespace to WordPress. These transitions can be complex and often require advanced technical work, so they are best handled by an experienced developer.
While we haven’t personally vetted them, WPExperts offers platform migration services that may be worth exploring.
Hosting
Different hosting companies have different basic configurations, services and support levels. We recommend either BigScoots or DeepRoots (formerly Agathon).
This must be a self-hosted WordPress installation (eg. not WordPress.com).
For the Full Site Conversion White Glove and Theme + Plugin Conversion, hosting on BigScoots is required so that a proper staging site is available.
Remove Pagebuilders
You must remove or migrate any content in pagebuilders (such as Elementor, Divi, Thrive, Beaverbuilder) before tackling a theme migration. See why we don't support pagebuilders.
We've been told wordherd.io does this, but we've never used them and can't vouch for their work.
WordPress version
Make sure that you're on the latest supported WordPress version for the theme, which can be found on the Feast compatibility page.
important
Do not change or update categories while migrating.
A theme migration already involves many moving parts, and adding category changes introduces unnecessary complexity and increases the risk of issues.
Categories are not tied to your theme and do not need to be updated as part of this process. Making changes to them during migration will only slow things down and create potential problems.
Wait at least 4 weeks after your staging site has been pushed live before making any category changes.
Phase 2
Core Setup
Theme Install
Most themes, including older versions of our own, contain outdated code and customizations that can cause more harm than good over time.
The best approach is to remove the old setup entirely and start fresh with a clean install. This helps avoid carrying over legacy issues and ensures your site is running on a stable, optimized foundation.
A theme install sets up the theme that's seen on the demo site without any previous customizations.
Access to all our themes are included with the Feast Plugin, which is what we recommend purchasing.
In the past, the theme was this "all in one" setup that included both styling and functionality. Now, themes aren't meant for functionality and are used only for styling.
The entire site setup (except installing the theme) is done through the Feast Plugin. See the Feast Plugin Setup tutorial.
NOTE: some outdated themes have built-in recipe cards - you must export or convert these recipes cards to a modern equivalent (WP Recipe Maker) before migrating.
Feast Plugin Setup
With the change to the block editor and eventually the "full site editor", we've had to rewrite how the themes were built to adapt to this new setup. While doing this, we've implemented more modern best practices for SEO and accessibility and created an overall better user experience.
See the Feast Plugin Setup for instructions on doing it yourself, or hire us to create it with the White Glove services.
If this is a brand new site, you can have us build you a full-configured brand new site with the Fresh Site White Glove service.
Phase 3
Post-Migration Tasks
(After staging is live)
Analytics
Make sure to check for, and re-add any analytics traffic code that may have been tied to the old theme.
We recommend using the Site Kit plugin to implement Google Analytics.
Ads
If you have ads, be sure to reach out to your ad network to let them know you've made a theme change/update so that they can make any necessary adjustments to their ad positioning and targeting.
Pagespeed
Our themes and plugin are designed to be compliant with pagespeed and SEO as much as possible, but this ultimately falls on external plugins, services, and plugin auditing.
There simply is no single solution to this, and any theme or framework claiming otherwise is lying (intentionally, or by omission).
The biggest factors affecting pagespeed, in order of importance, are:
- how you create your content and structure your site, including 3rd party plugins you use
- hosting
- pagespeed plugin (WP Rocket)
- theme
The bare minimum involves installing and properly configuring WP Rocket.
However, the key to attaining great pagespeed is removing poorly performing plugins and scripts. You must perform a plugin audit and pagespeed audit and remove any services and scripts that aren't designed for pagespeed (which is most of them).
The only goal of a recipe page is to provide a bunch of images + text to the reader so that they can make a recipe. Anything outside of this will compromise that experience and the penalty it introduces has to be justified.
Customizations
Customizations are anything that change the styling, laying, spacing, fonts, colors and structure of your site beyond our theme. See the Themes vs. Customizations post.
A theme is like a recipe: we create and test according to our setup (ingredients), and the intricacies of how everything ties together (from fonts to colors and spacing) is what makes it work.
Much like a recipe, once you start substituting and modifying the setup (ingredients), it's no longer the same recipe. Things stop working how they should.
We can only help you with our own recipe.
We don't offer customization services.
Once the theme and plugin have been setup and installed, you can begin performing customizations such as tweaking colors, fonts and styling. This can be done with CSS, or by hiring a designer.
In general, we don't recommend making customizations, see: why you shouldn't make customizations.
Any customizations, even seemingly minor things, requires significant back-and-forth with designers to guide decisions, ensure proper color contrast, avoid outdated solutions, and maintain performance standards like CLS. These changes also need to be reviewed and maintained every year to stay compliant with evolving best practices.
Because of this ongoing effort, customizations are not feasible for us to support at scale.
are both rare and in high demand.
Those we’re familiar with are typically booked 6–12 months out and require minimum project budgets in the thousands.
Ecommerce
We do not recommend or support ecommerce functionality.
That doesn't mean that you can't use woocommerce or run ecommerce functionality, it just means that our themes don't have built-in functionality and we do not offer any support for troubleshooting pagespeed or styling conflicts that arise from it.
Ecommerce setups often require ongoing technical support. In most cases, this means hiring a developer on a contract basis (typically $2,000+ per month) to maintain and troubleshoot issues.
Unless your ecommerce store is generating at least $2,000 per month in profit, this level of investment is not worthwhile in most cases.
Instead, we recommend using third-party platforms that are specifically designed for selling digital products, such as Gumroad, Kit (formerly ConvertKit), or Shopify. These tools handle payments, delivery, and customer management, without adding complexity to your website.
FAQ
Q: Will my URLS change?
A: Themes shouldn't modify URLs, so your URLs shouldn't change when changing themes.
However, we've seen at least one theme where certain posts were forced under a "recipes" slug. This is a misconfiguration on that specific theme and not something we're able to provide support for.
Q: What about my Pinterest / Google site verification?
A: This will depend on how they were implemented. If they were done in the "Customizer" rather than the code snippets plugin, they may be lost during an update.
You'll need to track down where this was done, and preferably re-implement it in the Code Snippets plugin (which isn't modified during a theme update) or the Google Site Kit plugin.