You’ve put in a lot of effort to customize your site with added CSS and HTML.

But will it survive an update to your WordPress theme? Here’s how to avoid that.

First, there is a great little plugin called MP Customizer Backups by Mint Plugins (available from the WordPress.org Plugins repository) which allows you to back up or restore all customizations added via Customizer. This is a great time saver for developers allowing you to return to a previous working version if something goes wrong. And of course you can update the theme and use this plugin to reapply your customizations if required.

The second plug-in is WP Add Custom CSS by Daniele De Santis. With this plugin, rather than editing the theme’s CSS file, you can simply add your changes or additions to this file so they are not overwritten when the theme updates. If you are familiar with vBulletin forum software, it works much like the additional.css template. ¹

Finally, the third plugin is Insert Headers and Footers by WPBeginner. As the name implies, this allows you to add HTML or PHP to customize the header or footer for your theme and again avoid having your changes overwritten by a theme upgrade.

Anything which makes your job as a WordPress site designer or developer a little easier is worth the few minutes it takes to install these plugins.

Happy WordPressing! 🙂

1 Update: I’ve recently discovered an alternate plug-in named Simple Custom CSS by John Regan & Danny Van Kooten which you may prefer (as I do). This includes highlighting for syntax, etc., similar to NotePad++.