Your site's design is its visual layer — the colours, fonts, backgrounds and overall styling that give your pages their look. You can change it at any time from the site editor, and you can preview a design before you commit to it.
Where to change the design
- Open your site in the editor.
- In the left menu, click Design.
- Under Templates, browse the available designs and click one to see a preview of it.
- To open the design at full size in a new tab, click Live Preview.
- When you have decided, click Choose, then read and confirm the message that appears.
If there is no Design entry in your left menu, design switching is not included in your plan or is not offered by your provider. Your support team can confirm what your plan covers.
What happens to your content
This is the part that surprises people most, so it is worth reading before you switch. There are two possible outcomes, and which one you get depends on how much of the site is already your own work.
- If your site is still largely as it came to you — you have added little or nothing of your own yet — switching brings the new design's example pages and content with it. The site ends up looking like the preview, because a preview is the design together with its example content.
- If you have already made the site your own — your own text, your own images, your own pages or menu — switching changes the look only. Colours, fonts and styling are updated, and your pages, text and images stay exactly where they are.
If there is anything of your own on the site, a short message appears before anything is applied, telling you which of the two is about to happen. Read it, and cancel if it is not what you expected. On a site you have not yet touched there is nothing to lose, so the new design is simply applied.
The second outcome is deliberate: once you have put work into a site, one click should not be able to erase it. It also explains a common question — an established site will not come out looking identical to the preview. The styling changes, but the example content you saw in the preview is not loaded over yours.
What the new design controls
A design sets the overall look: colour scheme, fonts, page backgrounds, button and heading styling, and the way headers and page sections are laid out. Your pages and their addresses, your text and images, your menu, your site settings, your domain and your account details are not part of the design and are not changed by switching.
Once a design is applied, you can fine-tune it in the same Design panel. Alongside Templates you may see sections such as Colour Schemes, Fonts, Background and Styles, depending on your plan. Changes made there are applied when you click Save.
Going back to how it was
Whether you can undo a design change depends on which of the two outcomes you got.
- When your content was kept, a version of the site is saved automatically just before the change. Go to Settings, open Version, find the entry from just before you switched, and click Restore. Be aware that a restore rolls the whole site back to that moment — it brings back the old design and the content as it was then, so anything you have saved since will be lost.
- When the new design's example content replaced yours, that is not something you can reverse afterwards. The earlier versions of the site are not kept through that kind of switch. If there is text or there are images you want to keep, copy them somewhere safe before you switch.
Checking the result and publishing
Always look through your pages after a design change, not just the home page. Different designs handle headers, spacing and images differently, so content that fitted neatly before may need a small adjustment.
Once you are happy with how everything looks, publish the site so that visitors see the new design. If anything still looks wrong after publishing — a page that seems incomplete, or styling that has not updated — try reloading the page in your browser first, and contact support if it persists.