WordPress Customizer How to Use It (Guide for 2019)

For many years, the WordPress Customizer was rather  lackluster in terms of functionality. However,  the WordPress 4.5 update has transformed the feature into a powerful front end editor that can be used to quickly kickstart WordPress projects from scratch.With the WordPress Customizer, you can drastically change the appearance and functionality of your WordPress website from one, manageable interface. That includes making changes to page elements including  your site title, background image, and menus.In this post, well guide you through the basics of how to use the WordPress Customizer  by making use  of its most powerful features: How to use the WordPress customizerNow that you have accessed your WordPress Customizer page, lets take a look at how to use the WordPress Customizer to quickly launch or modify a website.Just one more thing before we get cracking  Ã¢â‚¬â€œ note that the Customizers functionality relies largely on how much effort the active themes developers have put into utilizing it. For the sake of this tutorial, we will be using our own  Neve theme, which makes excellent  use of the Customizer.Configure Site Identity and designFirst up, we have site identity, which gives you control over the name and tagline of your WordPress website. Navigate  to Site Identity to get started.You can fill out the two fields under Site Title and Tagline, and immediately see the results on the preview window on the right. Furthermore, you can upload a favicon or site icon from this interface. Once youre done, simply click Save Publish:Manage menusThe WordPress Customizer also enables you to configure your websites menus. To get started, click on Menus on the WordPress Customizer menu.To create your websites first menu, click Add a Menu, type in your menus name, and then click Create Menu:Now that you have created your menu, you can click on the name of it to adjust its settings:The WordPress Customizer will enable  you to do a number of thing s with your new menu. You can change the name, adjust the order of the menu options, add new options, configure its  location, and specify if you would like WordPress to automatically update it  when future top-level pages are created.Its an extremely comprehensive set of configurations, squeezed quite comfortably into a small and manageable interface – a perfect example of the WordPress Customizers usefulness.To find out how to populate your menu with pages and posts, we recommend this guide on working with custom menus in WordPress.Swap website colorsThe colors used by your WordPress theme can also be modified, which will greatly impact the design of your website without much effort at all. To do this, head over to Colors on the Customizer menu.Depending on how many colors your theme makes use of, you can freely change them all before previewing the results  via the window  on the right. The Neve theme, for example, enables  you to swap out colors for the links us ed across the website.Set single post settingsAs well as simplifying settings that are found elsewhere on your WordPress back end, the WordPress Customizer also has some features that you wont be able to modify anywhere else. Your websites single post settings are one example of this.By clicking Single Post Settings on the WordPress Customizer menu, youll see what we mean.The next interface enables  you to make some small yet important changes to the way your blog posts are displayed on your website.  You can configure your settings to hide the authors description, hide related posts, and hide post thumbnails within the page itself:Modify a background imageIf your theme makes use of a background image, the WordPress Customizer lets you make changes to that, too. Click on Background Image to get started.Once again, the WordPress Customizer shows its power by enabling you to swap out your background image and configure a range of display options from within the same, small interfa ce.Interestingly, you can also configure your background image to Scroll. This essentially gives your background image a parallax effect, a popular website design trend that gives your website some depth:Mobile and tablet previewsLast but certainly not least, lets take a look at the WordPress Customizers mobile and tablet preview options.By default, the Customizer will display your website preview in desktop mode. However, if you use the icons at the bottom of the WordPress Customizer, you can switch between desktop, tablet, and mobile view:For example, by clicking on the tablet icon, the preview window on the right will quickly transform, showing you how your website will look to visitors using tablet devices:ConclusionWordPress is renowned for being a relatively easy CMS to use, and the Customizer is now arguably its most approachable feature.As you can gather from the guide above, it empowers you to do a variety of website-transforming tasks within a very simple interface. So,  if you arent making use of the WordPress Customizer, you may be wasting quite some  time doing those same customizations elsewhere on the WordPress back end.The next time you kickstart a WordPress project, bear in mind that you can use the Customizer to:configure  your sites identity and appearance,manage site menus,swap website colors,specify single post options,modify a  background image,preview your website in desktop, mobile, and tablet mode.Will you be using Customizer to help quickly launch future WordPress projects? Let us know your plans in the comments section below! How to use the #WordPress #Customizer 🔠¨