How to upload a custom Weebly Theme

If you've been dabbling in building your own Weebly website recently you may have got to the point of wanting a truly custom look for your site - a step up from the standard themes that Weebly offer. If that's the case, you've got a couple of options - hire a brilliant Weebly designer like 543 Designs (!), or purchase a custom Weebly theme that you can upload to your site yourself. There are a few companies out there who build those custom templates, but if you're looking for somewhere to start, try our Weebly themes site. Once you have your theme chosen and downloaded though, you're going to need to know how to upload it.

Step 1: Download The Theme
When you purchase a custom 3rd party theme for Weebly, you'll be asked to download a .zip folder or something similar. Depending on who you buy the theme from, this will either be the actual file/folder you will need to upload to your site, or it may need to be extracted to get to the .zip folder to upload. To figure out what type of file you have, click into the zip folder and see what the contents are. If the contents looks something like the picture below and have a whole lot of html files, then that folder is the one you'll be wanting to upload to your site. If the folder contains another zip folder, then you'll need to extract it and upload that final .zip folder. If in doubt though, just try uploading the folder to Weebly - if it works and you are offered a new theme to choose from, you've got it right, if it doesn't, then you may need to extract your .zip folder to get to the contents/.zip folder within it! Lot's of zipping around...!

Step 2: Upload The Theme

1. For the next step you'll need to login to your Weebly account and head to the site you've started to setup. If you haven't set one up, you'll at least need to do that and get to the point where you are sitting in the Weebly editor.
2. Next up you'll want to click on the "Theme" Tab in the top grey bar of your Weebly website editing screen.
3. This will open up a dialogue on the left hand side of the screen which gives you the option to "Change Theme". Click this and a new page will appear with all the standard Weebly themes for you to choose from.
4. To upload your custom theme, look for the "Import Theme" button in the top right of the screen. Click this and you'll get asked to upload that .zip folder we mentioned earlier.
5. Upload the custom theme .zip folder, and you'll then be able to choose it in the "Custom Themes" tab which opens. Once you've chosen it, you're good to go!

Below are some screenshots of that process.

Step 3: Get To Know Your Theme
Once you've uploaded your custom theme you'll realise that it will likely operate a bit differently to the standard Weebly themes you've come across. The first thing you'll want to do is make sure you have chosen the correct page setup you are wanting. Custom themes tend to come with alot more page variations than standard Weebly themes, so if you've seen a demo site that you want to imitate, you'll want to make sure you have figured out what 'page type' that demo site uses and choose it in the Pages menu.

From here, you'll find each Weebly custom theme has it's own peculiarities. Some one page themes need you to change your Page type to setup the navigation menu, some will have a set structure where you'll need to upload images or content in certain boxes, and alot these days have 'Theme Options' (see the screenshot below), which let you change individual elements of your theme (button colour etc). The first thing we would recommend doing is just familiarising yourself with all these options and page types. A little bit of effort in learning the theme at the start will stand you in great stead in further down the line.

You've got your theme
Hopefully once you've done all those things you'll have a good handle on your new theme and will be able to implement it on your site. Most theme providers also have pretty good support facilities, so if something really doesn't seem to be working, drop them a line and they should fix it up for you. Like everything new, your first Weebly theme may seem a bit daunting at first, but the more you use them and understand how they work, the more you'll love having a custom and flashy theme on your site.