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How To Show Multiple Themes On A WordPress Site

How to Show Multiple Themes on a WordPress Site

An UpStream user emailed us this week with an interesting question:

Is it possible to show different WordPress themes on different pages?

They need an answer because of a problem with their site’s theme. They had chosen a WordPress theme that looked great. However, the theme loaded all its CSS, even when the theme was not being used. This caused issues with any plugin that tried to go full-screen, including UpStream (which has a full-screen frontend design).

It was too late to choose a different theme (the user was hours away from launch), so we decided to stop the theme from showing on certain pages.

One easy way to do this is with the “Multiple Themes” plugin.

Multiple themes plugin for WordPress

  • Install this Multiple Themes plugin to your WordPress site.
  • Go to “Settings”, then “Multiple Themes plugin”.
  • Scroll down to the area labelled, “For An Individual Page, Post or other non-Admin page; or a group of pages, specified by URL Prefix, optionally with Asterisk(s)”. You’ll see the settings below:

settings for the Multiple themes plugin for WordPress

In the image above, I’m choosing to show the “Twenty Fifteen” theme only when “projects” in the URL.

This worked perfectly and solved the problem for our user. They could use their normal theme on most pages for the site, but whenever “projects” was in the URL, the Twenty Fifteen theme would be used. Because Twenty Fifteen follows better coding practices, it didn’t cause any conflicts with UpStream.

Other features of the Multiple Themes plugin

The Multiple Themes plugin has a ton of extra uses, beyond the one described in the first part of this tutorial.

For example, you can choose a theme that only appears on your homepage:

Different theme on your WordPress homepage

You can also show a different theme if a particular keyword is added to the URL in a query. One use for this would be to choose a particular theme for affiliate traffic. You could enter ?keyword=affiliate into this setting, and anyone who clicks an affiliate link would see the theme you choose.

Different theme for WordPress pages with keyword query

You can also choose a different theme for your Posts and Pages. This could be very useful if you have a blog-specific theme for your blog posts.

Different theme for WordPress posts only

There are many, many more settings available inside the Multiple Themes plugin. It’s really a useful plugin, and it comes with a lot of documentation. Don’t be worried by the warning on WordPress.org that it hasn’t been updated for a while. This is a solid plugin and can help you show multiple themes on a single WordPress site.

This Post Has 13 Comments
  1. Hi, I am currently looking at moving to WordPress, and I have found the perfect theme for my blog which gives me ability to customise the blog page layouts etc. However, it doesn’t include a page template with multiple photo galleries targeted at a photographer. My site is a mix of 3 blogs and one section to display photos.

    I am wondering, am I able to use the theme I have found as the main theme(TagDiv), but then for the pages I add for Photography, use a different purchased theme which is targeted to photography?

    So essentially:

    Homepage/Contact me/Info etc – TagDiv
    Blog 1 – TagDiv
    Articles and posts – TagDiv
    Blog 2 – TagDiv
    Articles and posts – TagDiv
    Blog 3 – TagDiv
    Albums / Galleries – Different theme targeted at photography
    Articles and posts – TagDiv

    any advice would be great!
    Thanks
    Samantha

  2. Personally, I wouldn’t bother with this plugin now.

    I have used it on a Woocommerce site for the past 4 years as the client decided he wanted to have a shop added just after I had finished creating his new website and the theme was not Woocommerce compatible. So I decided to use this plugin with one of the Woocommerce shop themes and the rest of the website could remain as it was.

    It has worked well, but unfortunately, it was taken over by another developer who has basically abandoned it (not updated in over 2 years). It also does not work (for me at least) using any version of PHP 7 and above. So using this for anything critical is asking for trouble now, unless of course, he updates it.

  3. The plugin seems to be designed to do a keyword application based on the URL. I have a website with a page dedicated to each state in the US. Is there quick way of applying a single theme to those pages but leave the primary theme in place for the rest of the site?

  4. Hello,

    One theme is active so how to update second theme options as that theme is not activated plus its styling, templates is totally different to active theme.

    Can you please help me here.

    Thanks!

  5. I’ve been using this for a while with two themes and it still seems to be ok (for my needs). That said, came here as I have hit an issue. Any ideas on how I can ensure searches made under different themes resolve to their respective theme results page? I’m using Query Keyword (domain.co.uk/?[s]=), but due to this, the same theme presents the results.

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