I’m changing the site theme from Elbee-Elgee to Suffusion and I’ll do it with the site running.

I expect it will take me 30 minutes to get most of the settings changed over and then I’ll fine tune it over the coming week.

If anything major goes wrong I’ll have to restore a backup which could cause a bit of down-time.

Tested off-line – but…

I have tested it on a off-line copy of the site so I don’t expect any major problems. The off-line copy is not a 100% copy because WordPress doesn’t run under a different URL without lots of messing about and re-writing.

The Duplicator plugin lets you copy a site to another URL but it breaks links because you have to change the permalink settings.

Why the Change ?

A year or two ago I experimented with the Suffusion theme. At the time I thought it a bit complicated and it didn’t work well with a couple of plugins I wanted. So I switched to Elbee-Elgee because it was simple, looked good and seemed to work.

Recently I found when adding categories and products that Elbee-Elgee didn’t play nice with the shopping cart. Category and product display was messed up. Without getting into theme design, the only advice was to get a new theme.

Suffusion has been updated since I last looked at it and there are now a couple of plugins to assist with eCommerce and forums.