A Theme That Has Not Been Updated Since 2018

The layer nobody thinks about

When a site misbehaves, attention goes to the add-ons, because they are visible, numerous, and each does something nameable.

The theme is different. It is the thing that decides what every page looks like and how it is put together, and it sits underneath everything else.

It is also the component people are least likely to have checked, partly because it does not usually announce updates as loudly, and partly because it is the piece that was chosen once at the beginning and never revisited.

Finding out when it was last touched

The theme's page in your site's admin will show a version number and often a link to where it came from.

Following that link tells you the current version and, more usefully, when it was last released.

A theme with releases in the last few months is being maintained. A theme whose last release was in 2018 is not, whatever the sales page still says.

Commercial themes bought once through a marketplace are the most common case, because the transaction ended years ago and nobody has any reason to tell you the product was discontinued.

What abandonment actually means

Not that the site will stop working tomorrow. It will probably keep working for a good while, which is exactly why the problem is easy to postpone.

It means three specific things are now true.

Nobody is fixing security flaws found in it, so anything discovered from now on stays open permanently.

Nobody is keeping it compatible with the platform underneath, which continues to move.

And nobody is adapting it to changes in browsers or devices, so it will gradually look and behave worse on hardware that did not exist when it was written.

The compatibility clock

This is the failure most sites actually hit, and it does not arrive gently.

The platform beneath your site updates, and at some point one of those updates removes something the old theme relied on.

The result is not a warning. It is a site that renders as unstyled text, or a layout that collapses, discovered by whoever looks at it first, which is often a customer.

The people this happens to are almost never the people who were unaware. They are the people who knew and had not got round to it.

Check whether the theme was edited directly

This matters more than the version number, because it determines what your options are.

If a previous developer made changes inside the theme's own files, rather than in a separate child theme, then updating the theme erases those changes.

That is usually the real reason a theme has not been updated in three years: somebody tried once, the site lost its customisations, it was rolled back, and the update was never attempted again.

Nobody wrote that down, so the current owner inherits a theme that cannot be updated for reasons that are no longer documented anywhere.

What a child theme does

A child theme is a small separate layer holding only your changes, which sits on top of the original and survives when the original updates.

It is the correct way to customise, and it is worth understanding even if you never touch code yourself, because it is the question to ask any developer working on your site.

Establishing whether you have one is straightforward: the theme list will show both a parent and a child if the arrangement exists.

If it does not, and the site has visible customisations, assume somebody edited the original directly.

A worked example

A distributor had a site on a commercial theme last released in 2017, running on a platform two major versions ahead of it.

Everything worked. The site looked dated but functional and the owner saw no urgency.

An audit found the theme's own files had been edited in four places, including the header and the product layout, with no child theme anywhere.

That explained a note in the handover documents saying simply that the theme must not be updated.

Rather than rebuild immediately, they did two things: they documented the four customisations properly, and they set a replacement date nine months out with a budget attached.

Seven months later a platform update broke the product layout. Because the customisations were documented and a replacement was already funded and half specified, that was a bad fortnight rather than an emergency.

Without the documentation it would have been a rebuild from a broken site with no record of why anything worked the way it did.

Replace or rebuild

These are different sizes of job and the distinction is worth being clear about.

Replacing the theme keeps your content, your page addresses, and your structure, and changes the presentation layer. It is disruptive but bounded.

Rebuilding means new structure, new addresses, and a migration, and it is a project with a proper budget.

An abandoned theme on an otherwise healthy site is usually a replacement. An abandoned theme on a site that also has obsolete add-ons, no backups, and content nobody has reviewed since 2017 is a rebuild, and treating it as a replacement will not go well.

What carries over

• Content and images transfer, though layout will need review.
• Page addresses can be preserved and should be.
• Forms and integrations usually need reconnecting and retesting.
• Custom layouts built by the old theme's tools often do not survive.
• Direct theme edits have to be rebuilt properly in a child theme.

The fourth item is the one that surprises people and is worth checking before committing to a date.

The counter-case

Not every old theme is a problem, and replacing one that is fine is money spent for nothing.

A simple theme, with no direct edits, on a site that is otherwise current and does not handle payments or logins, may be perfectly serviceable for a while longer even without recent releases.

The judgement is about exposure rather than age. What does it touch, what would break, and how quickly could you recover.

What is not defensible is not knowing the answer, which is the position most sites are actually in.

The decision path

1. Find the theme name and its last release date.
2. Check for a child theme in the theme list.
3. Ask whether files were edited directly, and document what was changed.
4. Decide replace or rebuild based on the whole site, not the theme alone.
5. Set a date and a budget before anything breaks.
6. Keep the documentation where the next person will find it.

The last step is what turns an eventual failure into a planned piece of work.

Getting more from a single template is covered in making one template work for nine services.

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West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.