WordPress is a name everyone is aware of today. It powers most of the websites you see over the web, which makes it the most used CMS and web development platform world over. But with this popularity, the platform also poses a challenge to the website owners in the form of a struggle to make a mark of their website over the visitors. There are so many WordPress websites built with the same themes, templates, and designs, and even though the content and the purpose of the websites may be different, they are not as new or appealing to the visitors. The reason, their similar and not so different look. So, in such a scenario, it becomes imperative to opt for uniqueness and engage in custom WordPress development to customize the website for its themes, designs, templates, and plugins, and this task can be easily performed by adding a CSS to your WordPress website. And all you will need to do is just some coding knowledge!
What is CSS?
Cascading Style Sheets is a web design language that you can use to customize the appearance of your website. It can work out to change a lot of things on your website from its layouts, colors, and fonts, to its themes and designs as well. With the help of this language, you can give a unique appeal even to a website that has been built up by picking up a commonly available and widely used WordPress theme. Thus, you get a chance to stand out amongst the crowd even when you are using something that is a popular part of that crowd.
How CSS Works?
Before we could get into the working of CSS, we first need to understand HTML. Hypertext Markup Language is what is used to write the primary code for your website. It is through this code that your web browser understands as to how your website will appear on the web pages. However, making changes to this code is a very hectic and time-consuming task. For instance, if you simply want to change fonts or colors of the posts on your website, there is no way you can do it in one single go when you are using an HTML code. What you will have to do is, go to every single blog, and manually edit the HTML code for each of those blogs to carry out the required changes.
Cascading Style Sheets come as a savior in such a situation. With CSS, you need not go through all this hustle. CSS directs the HTML elements on your website and set out how these elements will look on the website. So, when you are using CSS, you only need to write up a CSS code and apply it to your website, without making any edits to the HTML code, for any change you want to make on your website as regards its appearance. This provides you better control at directing your website’s appearance and you can always keep it new and appealing with simple and quick changes to its designs and layouts.
How You Can Add CSS to Your WordPress Website?
There are several ways you can add CSS to your WordPress Website. One way is to add it directly to your WordPress theme’s style sheet by adding the CSS code snippet to it. However, this can be a risk, especially if you are not using a child theme, but a parent theme instead. Even a minor error can work very adversely and ruin the complete appearance of your website or may even break the website. Moreover, anytime you make an update to your website’s theme, you will lose the CSS changes, and you will have to work out all through the beginning at every instance of an update. So, this method is usually not recommended, and even if recommended, it is for the professionals, who are well-versed with coding and exactly know what they are doing, so that there is no chance of any errors.
This foregoing paragraph must have sound adding CSS to your website to be quite a difficult task, but trust that it is not! There are also very easy and quick ways that will have you working with CSS in a matter of minutes.
- Theme Customizer
This is an option that you will find right on the dashboard of your WordPress Website. To add CSS using this theme customizer, follow these steps-
Step 1: Take your mouse pointer to “Appearance” and from the further list that appears, click on “Customize”.
You will be directed to a “Theme Customizer Interface”, showing you a preview of your website on the right and a list of several options on the left.
Step 2: Navigate to “Additional CSS” on the list and click on it.
This will open a blank box where you can write up your CSS code. As you will write up a valid code, you will be able to see the changes reflected in the preview of your website.
You can add as many codes as you want, and every code you write for the changes will reflect the changes in your entire website.
Step 3: Once you are done making your changes, click on “Publish”.
- CSS Plugin
WordPress Plugins are the best way to add a functionality to your website. WordPress has a huge plugin directory that offers easy installation and use of plugins. Besides that, WordPress also supports custom plugin development, for you to customize the plugins as per your needs. So, with such a wide range of plugins over the CMS, it shall not be difficult for you to find a plugin to add CSS to your website. Follow the following steps to add CSS to your website through plugin.
Step 1: When you use a CSS plugin, a separate item will be created under the “Appearance” tab of your dashboard by the name of “Custom CSS”.
Step 2: Click on this item and you will see a blank dialog box. This is the space where you can write your CSS code for making the changes you need to make to your website.
Step3: Once you have written the code snippets, click on “Update Custom CSS”, and the changes you made through the code will be reflected on your entire website.
Adding CSS to your website can help you efficiently control the appearance of your website and keep it unique which is very important for the success of the website. And the process is really simple, and you can get started in minutes. All you need is to determine correctly what method you want to use to add the CSS code. Theme Customizer and CSS Plugin are comparatively easier and even a better option, so this is highly recommended.
With a proper approach, you can make the most of this amazing language that is the most popular web designing language and bring your website some great value.
