Is your site’s current theme is very slow or does it has too many glitches or you are unsatisfied with your site’s appearance?

For any of such issues all you can do is go for a new theme or debug and work on your current theme. To debug you need some technical skills, but switching a new theme is very simple as it only takes a minute to setup. As an administrator you would always like to offer a better experience for your users by improving the site speed or by tweaking the design etc. If you are building a wordpress website from scratch then there is no trouble in changing or testing various themes because nobody is going to see it, but what about a live site where you are receiving thousands of visitors a day. Here let’s see how to test a wordpress theme without changing the existing theme for live visitors.

There are several high quality websites like Theme Forrest, Elegant themes, Themify, Theme Fuse and Mojo themes etc where you can find the best themes to suit your blog or website. Let’s assume that you have bought a nice fascinating theme and you would like to run it on your live website. Usually setting up a new theme in a live site is very stressful because you do not know when the theme causes trouble and tends to break something. Also attaining the desired look from the theme will take few days or even a month depending on your creativity.

So how to test your new theme; you can test it in a dummy domain, but what if you don’t have one. You can test it in local computer which most developers do and we have tutorials for that, but this takes a long process and it’s not recommended for beginners. For instance here is how to setup wordpress on localhost using WAMP and here is how to clone a live wordpress site to localhost, but here comes the better way. By using a plugin you can preview and test your theme in live environment without changing your site’s appearance or without showing any errors to your regular users.

Theme Test Drive WordPress plugin allows you to safely test drive any theme on your blog as administrator, while visitors still use the default one. It happens completely transparent and they will not even notice you run a different theme for yourself. Best part is you can even set the testing theme options (if it has them) in the Admin panel while you are testing the theme.