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.
- 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:
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:
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.
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.
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.