The Theme Customizer is perfect to apply changes to your website and immediately preview the changes before saving them. You can enter the customizer through your WordPress dashboard and then take necessary steps to modify your website or easily enable / disable certain theme options. However, depending on your hosting provider or the plugins you’re using it can happen that you encounter issues when using the Theme Customizer. We have put together an overview of frequently asked questions and their solutions to the most common issues with the customizer.
- How to access the Theme Customizer
- Theme Customizer is not working correctly
- Theme Customizer shows a blank page
- Changes in Theme Customizer won’t take effect
- Internal server errors when accessing Theme Customizer
- How to add custom CSS code in Theme Customizer
- You have not found a solution to your issue?
How to access the Theme Customizer
To access the Theme Customizer and customize your website, please navigate to Appearance => Customize in your WordPress dashboard. To quickly access specific areas of the customizer, like for example the section where you can edit your header, you can take a short cut and navigate to Appearance => Header. But in general it’s recommended to simply access the customizer directly where all options are only a few clicks away.
Theme Customizer is not working correctly
If your Theme Customizer is not working, this can have several reasons. Therefore we have created a more detailed tutorial which helps you understand the customizer and gives answers to most common issues you might have: Theme Customizer not working in WordPress.
In case you can only see a blank page or your changes won’t take effect, please have a look at the next section just below. In general, issues with the Theme Customizer are most often rooted with 3rd party plugin conflicts or problems with external scripts. So it is best to deactivate / replace plugins or remove scripts and see if that solves the issue.
Theme Customizer shows a blank page
In WordPress 4.0 Panels have been introduced which theme developers allows to add custom panels for their theme options. We have implemented this great feature in our WordPress themes. In case you open the Theme Customizer and only see a blank page, then one possible cause might be, that you are running an old version of WordPress. To quickly solve this issue, please see this tutorial: How to fix the add_panel() error when customizer does not work.
Changes in Theme Customizer won’t take effect
When you are working with the Theme Customizer, you can preview changes in real time. After you hit the Save & Publish button, these changes should take effect when you look at your website in the front end. If that is not the case on your website and in case changes don’t take effect, please ensure that you have saved your changes properly.
In addition please ensure that you have no caching plugins running and clear your browser cache. Whenever you see changes not taking effect on your website after saving the changes, in 99.9% of the time this is related to caching issues which you can fix by clearing the cache (plugins, browser, etc…). In case clearing the cache does not help either, please refer to the above section: Theme Customizer is not working correctly.
Internal server errors when accessing Theme Customizer
If your site is hosted on a shared hosting server, it might happen that your server is running out of resources when accessing the Theme Customizer. This can not only affect the customizer, but also very likely slow down your entire website.
If you already have done some troubleshooting, deactivated plugins, removed scripts and have an updated WordPress environment running, then we would recommend that you contact your hosting provider and see if they are able to upgrade your hosting plan or if they can check the server logs to narrow down the source of your issue.
How to add custom CSS code in Theme Customizer
Our popular MH Magazine WordPress theme comes with a useful feature to insert custom CSS code through the customizer. Using this feature is recommended and very helpful for minor CSS customizations. Larger customizations usually should be carried out through a child theme. You can access and use the custom CSS field when navigating to Appearance => Customize => Theme Options => Custom CSS. This custom CSS won’t get lost after regular theme updates.
You have not found a solution to your issue?
In case you have not found answers to your questions in this support article, please also take a look at our other support topics, as it is very likely that you will find your answer there. If you have purchased a WordPress theme by MH Themes and have a valid license to gain access to theme updates and support, then you may also send a support request for additional assistance.