There are several ways to update a theme, and this article covers the recommended update process for our own themes. If you want to update a theme that hasn’t been created by ThemeVision, we suggest to contact the original author.

Automatic Update

1. Register your theme by following next guide: Product Registration.
2. Go to Admin Dashboard -> Updates page and if the update is available you will be able to proceed with automatic update.

Manual update

If automatic update is not an option, you can always do it the old-fashioned way. If you’re going down this road, it’s very important that you know what you’re doing: messing with the wrong files could break your site entirely. We also recommend backing up your site first, just in case.

Downloading theme files

1. Login to your Theme-Vision.com account and head over to your dashboard.
2. Download the theme ZIP file from your downloads page.

Removing old theme files

1. Connect to your server using FTP (or the method of your choice) and find the folder of your theme (for example, if you want to update Agama Pro, it should be the wp-content/themes/agama-pro folder).
2. Download any files that you may have customized, like functions.php and style.css (which are the most likely files that you could have made changes to). Note that, if you don’t do this, all changes you may have made to the theme will be lost (unless, as we suggested before, you’re using a child theme).
3. Remove the folder of your theme.
4. Disconnect from your server.

Uploading new theme files

Using WordPress admin

1. On your WordPress Dashboard, go to Appearance → Themes.
2. Find and click the Add New button, and then the Upload Theme button.
3. Upload the theme ZIP file you downloaded and click Install Now.
4. Wait until the process is done and click Activate.

Directly to the server

1. Extract the ZIP’s contents and find the extracted theme folder.
2. Connect to your server using FTP (or the method of your choice) and find the wp-content/themes folder.
3. Create a folder for the theme (for example, if you’re updating Agama Pro, it should be wp-content/themes/agama-pro) and upload the extracted contents there.
4. Disconnect from your server.
5. On your WordPress Dashboard, go to Appearance → Themes.
6. Find the theme you just uploaded, and click Activate.

That’s it. Your theme should be updated to the latest version now.

Additional notes

• If you’re just starting with FTP or want to use a reliable and user-friendly client to transfer your files, we recommend FileZilla, which you can download for free. In case you don’t know what FTP is, you may want to read this article first.

Re-applying customizations

As we stated, both automatic and manual updates will remove the old files in your theme folder, so that’s why it’s important to backup any changes you’ve made to the theme files beforehand (and, again, that’s why you should be using a child theme).

If you didn’t make any changes to the theme files, there is no risk of losing theme settings, pages, posts, etc, and backwards compatibility is guaranteed.

If you have made changes to the theme files, you will need to compare your modifications with the current theme files (the changelog.txt files in both the new version and the backup can help you with that) and merge them together. If the only files you modified are functions.php and style.css, you’re most certainly safe because those files don’t usually change. But, just in case, we still recommend you to merge instead of overwriting.