How to Use Multiple WordPress Themes and Templates on One Website

Discover how ThemeSwitcher Pro lets you run multiple WordPress themes on one site for courses, eCommerce, landing pages, and more.

For a limited time, save 25% on ThemeSwitcher Pro with the coupon code: LIFTERLMS

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How to Run Multiple WordPress Themes on One Website

Chris Badgett sits down with Brad Williams and Mitch Canter of WebDev Studios to walk through Theme Switcher Pro, a plugin that lets you run multiple WordPress themes on a single install. The session covers live demos on landing pages, WooCommerce, and LifterLMS, the iterative rebuild business case for agencies, and how to try modern block themes without a full site rebuild.

What You’ll Learn

• How to run more than one WordPress theme on a single install without going to Multisite
• How to route WooCommerce pages, LifterLMS pages, or individual landing pages to a different theme in one click
• Why Theme Switcher Pro is built to hold up on enterprise hosts like WordPress VIP
• How agencies can pitch iterative website rebuilds instead of six-figure relaunches
• How to test the block editor and full site editing safely without committing your whole site

Key Takeaways

• The traditional “one theme, one website” rule is a WordPress convention, not a technical constraint
• The fastest way for legacy sites to try modern block themes is to route one section at a time
• Page builder sites (Elementor, Divi, Beaver Builder) can add Gutenberg on a single page without giving up the builder
• Iterative rebuilds on a monthly retainer are easier to sell than one big relaunch
• Start with your blog or one landing page, learn the block editor there, then chip away at the rest

Frequently Asked Questions

Full Webinar Transcript

Why Running Two WordPress Themes on One Site Used to Feel Impossible

Chris Badgett: Hello and welcome to this complimentary training. I am joined by Brad Williams and Mitch Canter from Theme Switcher Pro, which is made by WebDev Studios, one of the leading WordPress agencies in our space. Today we are going to get into how to use multiple WordPress themes and templates on one website with Theme Switcher Pro.

I was so excited when I saw this drop, because it is really hard to change themes all at once, especially if you have an established site. Maybe you want to test modern WordPress or full site editing but you are not ready to switch over the whole site. These guys and the team developed a great product to solve a pain they were having in their agency. So whether you are a course creator or a coach, or you build WordPress LMS sites for clients, you are all going to get a lot out of this.

We are going to do some demos. We are going to go super simple and then get more complex. We are also going to talk about WooCommerce and all the different ways you can use multiple WordPress themes on one website. I have been there, thinking, man, I really want to use this theme for a landing page but not my whole site or some other marketing campaign. I am really excited to get into it.

WebDev Studios and Seventeen Years of Building on WordPress

Brad Williams: Awesome, thanks Chris. Quite the intro. My name is Brad Williams, co-founder and partner at WebDev Studios. I am joined by Mitch Canter, our director of engineering.

Mitch Canter: Hello.

Brad Williams: We have been in the WordPress space for a long time. We are in our 17th year, and early next year we will be in our 18th year of building open source solutions with WordPress. We have seen a lot of trends come and go. We have watched WordPress grow from a simple blogging platform to powering half the internet, and we have been along for that ride.

One of the things we are known for is solving complex challenges. Dev is in our name. We have been pushing the envelope with WordPress for years. We were building native apps running WordPress on iOS and Android back before anyone knew that was possible. We just like trying different things and thinking outside the box, especially when there are hard problems.

Why So Many Sites Are Stuck on the Classic Editor

Brad Williams: WordPress has been around for a long time, and the block editor has actually been around for a long time too. Gutenberg came out in 2016. But it really did not get fully adopted by the larger community until the last three, four, five years. I think the pandemic slowed adoption down a little, and I think a lot of us wanted the block editor to be really stable before we went all in.

So there is a big population out there. A lot of clients, a lot of websites running WordPress, on the classic editor. They are running the old WYSIWYG editor. They are not running the block editor. They are not running Gutenberg. Their current setup is not able to support that.

What options do they have? Traditionally the option is you need to rebuild your website. You need a new theme that is modern, that uses blocks, that follows all the standards of WordPress. You need to sunset and get rid of your old theme. That is a big project for most people. It is a full rebuild. It is a relaunch. That is not a small task.

Why the Full Rebuild Is a Hard Sell in a Tight Budget Market

Brad Williams: So we started thinking, rather than a full rebuild, is there a way we could selectively replace certain sections of the website with something new? Not flip everything over in one night the way we are all used to doing. Is there a way to replace just a single section of a website using a new modern block based WordPress theme while everything else keeps running what they had?

That is the question we asked ourselves. And I like to think anything is possible if you have a lot of smart people sitting around a table, which we do at WebDev Studios. Especially the last couple of years, if you have been in the WordPress space, especially the client services space, it has been weird out there. It has been harder to get projects. Budgets have been tight. Selling a six-figure redesign and rebuild has been a lot harder.

The Iterative Rebuild Business Case at Ten Thousand a Month

Brad Williams: Now imagine rather than saying this is going to cost you $100,000 and we will relaunch it in four to six months, what if you could say, hey, we will do this over the course of 12 months, a $10,000 investment per month, or whatever number makes sense, and we will iteratively start replacing sections of your website. So when we are done at the end of 12 months, we have replaced all the old sections with the new theme, and now we can sunset your old theme. You just relaunch your whole website iteratively over time. Less investment, less involvement.

A website rebuild is a huge undertaking, especially for the client. There is a lot they have to do. Content, understanding the new system, helping make decisions. It is a huge time suck for them. So imagine stretching that three to six month project out. Now it is a lot more manageable. We pitched the idea to some clients and they were very receptive. We started building it out, and by and large it has worked really, really well.

What Theme Switcher Pro Actually Does

Brad Williams: So the solution we came up with is called Theme Switcher Pro. If you want to boil down everything I just said, it lets you run multiple themes on one WordPress installation. And it can be selective. You could have one page that runs one theme and everything else runs something else. You could have a custom post type, maybe a movies database where you review movies, on its own theme. You can go as granular as a single page or a single post.

We have also found other use cases that some of our clients are using that we had not really considered. To your point, Chris, of, hey, I want to launch some landing pages. So they use a theme that is optimized and built for landing pages just for that. Some of our clients are actively doing that. They are pumping out landing pages faster than they have ever been able to, because we have set them up with a really beautiful block theme.

Setting a Different Theme by Post Type or Individual Page

Mitch Canter: I can demo how easy it is to set up, and just show a working example. This is just a really typical WordPress back end. This one is running LifterLMS. Everything you can do inside Theme Switcher Pro is done inside the Theme Switcher Pro panel, and we have tried to make it so there are as few clicks as possible.

Let us start high level. We have all these different post types, and we want to say, hey, I want to take one of these post types and use a different theme. If I go to the site as it currently stands, it is running a fairly typical website theme, 2025. If I go back and say I want this post type to use SkyPilot, then save the settings, and immediately go back to the home page, all of those pages have now switched over to the new theme.

I can go into an individual page too and say, I want just this page on a different theme. Maybe I do not want all pages. Maybe there are only individual pages. It is like the ship of Theseus, where you take the pieces of the ship and replace them over time, and eventually you have the brand new ship waiting for you at the end. That is the goal.

Running SkyPilot on Your LifterLMS Pages Only

Mitch Canter: We have added some extra controls to make several things one-click. You do not want to have to go through and say, I want my WooCommerce checkout page and my shop page and my individual product page and my cart page, one at a time. If WooCommerce is installed, you would be able to say, I want all of my WooCommerce pages to switch over to the theme I choose.

That is really useful because a lot of people want to utilize Gutenberg but are locked into a site design that either is set up as a hybrid theme where you can use blocks but not much else, or they want to be able to use one of the WooCommerce-specific themes.

The same goes for LifterLMS. We have worked very closely with the LifterLMS team to make sure this works with the SkyPilot theme, and not only the theme itself but all the individual pages within LifterLMS that make it special. You can come in here and say, I want to turn all of my LifterLMS pages into SkyPilot, save settings, and immediately start clicking through the course catalog, the dashboard, the membership catalog, and all these different pieces are running the theme you set in the back end.

Why Theme Switcher Pro Is Built for Performance at Scale

Brad Williams: Performance is critical for us. We work with very large clients, large projects, enterprise level. We had to build this thing to make sure it was performant. It cannot be a massive taxing database hit every single time the page is loading to figure out what is what. It is never going to work at scale.

Mitch Canter: The way it is built, it is performant. It does not load all of the themes. It just loads what it needs.

Brad Williams: We actually have this running on WordPress VIP for one of our clients. We have this running on other hosts. So this works at scale, which we knew it had to or it was a non-starter for us. It caches where it needs to, but it is also flexible and fast.

Configuring Theme Switcher Pro Through Code and Filters

Brad Williams: I also want to make the point that we might have some developers in the audience. While we are showing the UI and how you can point and click, one of my favorite features about Theme Switcher Pro is you can do all of that and more directly through code.

As a company that develops a lot of applications for clients, UIs are great, but they also expose things that somebody could accidentally change. So you have to make sure that people with access to admin-level controls are administrators only. You do not want to have your entire company in there. Only people that really know what they are doing.

Two, you can actually disable this entire admin UI and hide it. We are going to introduce a feature where you can easily do that through a filter, too. You can configure all of this through code. So there is no chance, unless they get into the code, that they could accidentally switch out SkyPilot for another theme. It is set in code. That allows version control, and especially for the more advanced applications you do not want someone getting in here and changing this stuff.

Using Any WordPress Conditional as a Theme Trigger

Mitch Canter: Any conditional inside of WordPress can be used to trigger a theme. Is front page, is blog, is category, is tag, is archive, any of those conditionals. But also any other PHP conditional. I can run a query and say I want all of the pages that were published after a certain date to use Theme Switcher, and that is something you can do too. A lot of people like doing it that way because they set their line in the sand of, hey, this is when I want to switch over to the new theme, but I want to go back and touch pages manually for older stuff.

The sky is the limit. If there is a way that you can conditionally call something in WordPress, you can use that to trigger Theme Switcher in the way that you need it to.

Building an Ollie Landing Page on a Site Themed With 2025

Brad Williams: Let me show a few things off too. Basic local install, I have 2025 as my active theme. I also have Ollie and Storefront installed but not active. As long as they are in your theme directory, they become available for Theme Switcher Pro.

I love Ollie. I think Ollie is just an amazing theme out of the box. So I want to make an Ollie landing page. In the block editor, on the right, Theme Switcher shows me every theme available. I select Ollie, save draft. The style shifts slightly. Now when I go to the patterns, I am not just loading Ollie on the front end. I am loading Ollie on the back end. I have access to all the patterns, the blocks, everything Ollie gives me at my fingertips.

I throw in a header, an “about our features” section, a callout, a call to action, publish the page, and there it is. This is Ollie running on a 2025 active themed WordPress website. And this is the free version of Ollie, not Ollie Pro. It is kind of insane how quickly you can throw together a beautiful landing page. The landing page use case is one area I did not fully expect clients would lean into, and they are leaning into it hard, because it gives them so much flexibility outside of touching their main website without going the Multisite route.

One Click to Route Every WooCommerce Page to Storefront

Brad Williams: Now let us look at the WooCommerce feature. WooCommerce is activated. I have some dummy products. Under Integrations, Theme Switcher knows I have WooCommerce and asks, hey, do you want to just switch it all over to something? Yes, I do. Let us switch it all over to Storefront, which is the optimized WooCommerce theme built and supported by Automattic. Just like SkyPilot for LifterLMS, Storefront is the WooCommerce equivalent, ready to go out of the box and configured for WooCommerce.

Now my homepage is still normal. But as soon as I go into my shop, I am on Storefront. It is everything. Products, archives, taxonomies, cart, the full checkout process, my account, downloads, addresses. It knows everything WooCommerce is running.

Running Three Themes on One WordPress Install

Brad Williams: As soon as I leave WooCommerce, I am right back to 2025. As soon as I go to my About page, I am on 2025. But do not forget about my Ollie page, which is not in my menu. That is still running Ollie. In a couple of clicks I am now running three different themes for three very specific reasons on my website, and I have not touched one line of code.

This is when the light bulb starts to turn on. People start to think about how they could use this and what they could use it for, especially from the client services side. If you run your own website or you work at a company, this is a great tool for you. But this also opens up a revenue channel for people building websites with WordPress. Rather than a full redesign, rebuild, relaunch, now you have options that might help you get more sales when otherwise you would not be able to.

The Musician Example and Two Ways to Handle the Visual Handoff

Mitch Canter: One thing we have forked between is, do we want the site to look the same as the site we are switching from, or is it going to be its own presence? With a little bit of styling, it can be either.

Take musicians. Bands will have a band page styled to be whatever their album or brand aesthetic is, but they want a storefront where they can sell their merch, and it is going to be a different look. A lot of bands have two or three different platforms to do all of this. Theoretically a band could have all their stuff on one WordPress installation. Music and discography and tour information on one theme, storefront running on something that looks completely different, all managed in the same spot.

We had another client taking a more traditional switching approach. They had about 300 to 400 pieces of content on a bespoke website built in ACF or a page builder style. They wanted to transition to native Gutenberg blocks. They switched over content one by one, and tweaked the design so that to the untrained eye you would not be able to tell the difference between one theme and the other during the migration.

Matching Header and Footer for a Seamless User Experience

Brad Williams: If you are working with someone who has a classic WordPress setup and you want to iteratively replace it with a new block theme, one of the big questions is, is it not going to look drastically different across the board? Yes, it is out of the box. Just look at SkyPilot versus 2025. Look at the headers. They are not the same at all. That would be a very weird user experience if you were flipping back and forth.

How we approach this is that the new block theme we create for our clients actually mimics the header and footer of their legacy site. Or you could upgrade the header and footer on the legacy side for something more modern. Either way, we want classic theme and new modern theme to have headers that look identical. When you flip between the two sections, the only thing that should catch your eye is that the content made with the block editor should actually look a lot better than content made with the WYSIWYG editor.

Having those global elements, header and footer, more common, and then styling your new block theme to match the styles on your other site, means the client can start producing new content with blocks without needing code. It just allows them to use modern WordPress without the experience feeling jarring.

Switching Astra to SkyPilot on the Student Dashboard

Chris Badgett: About 20% of LifterLMS users use WooCommerce instead of the native LifterLMS e-commerce. I wanted to show a demo of using SkyPilot inside a site that already runs a page builder friendly theme.

This site is built with Astra. Pretend this is an Elementor page. I am actually using Astra’s block editor support with a lightweight LifterLMS pattern library called Aircraft. That is a page builder of sorts. But then, once people get into the LMS, they want to use SkyPilot. So I jump over to the student dashboard, and this is SkyPilot, and it has a great design. All I did was use the theme switcher option to flip that dashboard from Astra to SkyPilot.

A lot of themes like Astra and Cadence that are popular with page builders have LifterLMS support and other LMS plugin support and WooCommerce support. So you can play around and try out full site editing and Gutenberg. And there is a challenge of making your site look consistent. If I jump into the full site editor for SkyPilot I can change the typography, find the right font, start merging the look and feel, and start modifying the header and footer so they look the same either on the SkyPilot side or on the Astra side.

Why Page Builder Users Should Care About Theme Switcher Pro

Chris Badgett: Page builders are a major hold up for some people moving over to the Gutenberg editor and full site editing, because they have all these landing pages built in with tools like Elementor and Beaver Builder.

Brad Williams: Page builders are like Gutenberg before Gutenberg. Really they were like the site editor before the site editor. Point and click and drag and drop your entire website, header, footer, everything. There is a lot of appeal to page builders because they gave you a lot of control. On the flip side, the challenge is that they give you a lot of control. Too many options, too many things you can do, and things start to go crazy.

There is a place for page builders in the world. Page builders can always move faster than WordPress core, and they have huge audiences. So we knew it was important that Theme Switcher Pro supports page builders. Whether you want to get off a page builder, whether you want to get on a page builder, or whether you want to use Theme Switcher Pro alongside a page builder for landing pages or WooCommerce, we have validated it as fully compatible with Divi, Elementor, Beaver Builder, and the ones you would expect. Compatibility with the top products in the WordPress space, the LifterLMSs and WooCommerces of the world, is the second priority right after performance and security.

The Enterprise Use Case Where One Template Handles Ninety Five Percent of Traffic

Brad Williams: If you are on a page builder and looking for a way to get off it without a full rebuild-and-relaunch, Theme Switcher Pro is your option. You can use Ollie or SkyPilot or something else off the shelf, or have someone build you a custom theme, and then selectively swap pages over.

I have worked on big media sites where 95% of their traffic went to a single article page. We replaced one template with a new theme. Now 95% of their traffic is getting served a modern, performant, block-based theme. Forget the home page. It is like 5% of their traffic. It is the single article page where everyone is going to read articles. So think about what the most impactful thing you could change is. Maybe it is your home page. If it is 90% of your traffic, and you replace that with a massively performant block theme, how would that impact your business? It would probably be a very positive impact.

Running SkyPilot on WooCommerce Pages Only

Brad Williams: Under Integrations, Theme Switcher knows we are on WooCommerce. We already turned it on for Storefront. Let us switch it to SkyPilot. Hit save. Go right back out. It does not touch the home page. It does not touch anything else except for WooCommerce. As soon as we go to the store, we start to see SkyPilot styling coming in. It looks more like the LifterLMS look with unified styling.

You do not want to be in LifterLMS and then someone goes to buy something and it completely changes the look and feel and they think they have left your website. That unified experience, especially when someone is about to give you money, is so important. You never want to confuse someone right before they spend money. Under my account, it knows it is WooCommerce, so it uses SkyPilot too. But if I go back to the home page or the About page, it is still on 2025. And the Ollie landing page is still on Ollie. We are running three themes, and this is SkyPilot instead of Storefront on the commerce side.

Why This Opens a New Revenue Lane for Agencies

Mitch Canter: The idea of running a second WordPress theme is sort of counterintuitive to everything you know about WordPress. But when you put it in the right context, it is absolutely the right move. It really gives people the option to take their own approach and forge their own path from the not-so-modern website to everything WordPress has to offer.

Brad Williams: As an agency, one of the best things you can do, especially with the ebbs and flows in work, is figure out how to have recurring revenue. You do that through support retainers. Instead of selling a project at four to six months, what if you said we can do this over 12 months, or over 18 months, and stretch this out. The price comes down, the time commitment comes down, and now you have a very predictable client for the next 12 to 18 months of exactly how much time you are going to dedicate to them, as you work to slowly transition their website. Maybe it is a theme you built or maybe it is one you take off the shelf. Like Ollie or something more modern that uses everything WordPress is capable of now.

Running Different Page Builders on Different Pages

Chris Badgett: Garrison has a creative question. If you are using Theme Switcher Pro, do you have to use only one builder, or could you do different builders on different pages? Let us say somebody is using the Divi theme and the Divi builder, and they want to try Elementor Hello theme and the Elementor builder. Could you do two page builder plugins on one website?

Brad Williams: Our plugin only affects the theme. If you have a plugin running, like the Beaver Builder plugin, that is still active. Our plugin is not going to touch plugins. Our plugin touches themes. It says, okay, if you want to run Beaver Builder on this one page, you can do that. If the plugin is powering it, of course it is still active and it is still going to know that all the stuff in the plugin is there for you to use. That was part of our testing, to make sure that holds true, especially with some of the page builders that are set up like that as a plugin.

The plugin does not impact site settings either. We are not changing the active theme. WordPress still says the active theme is 2025. What we are doing is essentially overriding that at a higher load order to say, actually no, it is going to be this instead. So to the core question, could you use more than one page builder? Absolutely. There is no limit to the number of themes. We have tested this up to 36 or 38 themes, though please do not do that.

Why There Is No Free Trial, Only a Thirty Day Money Back Guarantee

Chris Badgett: Someone in chat asks if you offer a free trial.

Brad Williams: We actually do not. We thought about it and went round and round on it. We decided 30 days, no money, no questions asked, you want your money back, you got it. Simple as that. If you are interested in it, purchase a copy, test it out. Even if you say, you know what, I just want to check it out, I am just not going to use it, cool, here is your money back. We are not sitting here arguing about refunds. It either works for you or it does not.

With the LIFTERLMS discount code at themeswitcher.com, it comes down to about $75, which is a great deal. Really think about this not only for your own websites, but especially if you are an implementer, freelancer, or work at an agency. This can generate revenue. If a client says, I cannot switch my theme and I do not want to do Multisite, but I really need SkyPilot, hey, now you have an option. Theme Switcher Pro and everything else they want to do, they can now do.

Selling Retainers Around an Iterative Website Rebuild

Brad Williams: When it comes to closing more client work, this gives you another option of how you want to build or implement a new block theme or a new feature. Most clients when they come to you say, I have a website and I want a new website. Traditionally it would be, great, let us go through design and development, in four to six months we will do a content migration, and we will have a big launch day, set up all the redirects, and hope everything goes good.

Or, why not focus on that new block theme, that new style, and use something like Theme Switcher and say, hey, why do we not just chip away at it? Set up a retainer. Stretch this out over 12 or 18 months. The price comes down, their time commitment comes down, and you have a predictable client for the next 12 to 18 months. And especially as budgets have been tight the past couple of years, standing out matters. Theme Switcher Pro can help you set yourself apart. Now you have another option that other people probably are not thinking about or may not even realize is possible.

Starting Small With Drafts and the Old Switcheroo

Chris Badgett: If somebody has been using Elementor or another page builder for a long time and they want to try Gutenberg and full site editing, where do they start? The first thing that comes to mind is, well, install Theme Switcher Pro and use a full site editing Gutenberg compatible theme on your About page and see what you can do. But what else would you say to help them not go all in, but start testing the waters?

Brad Williams: What you just said is perfect. When Theme Switcher is running, you can create content as drafts, and that content uses the new block editor and your new theme.

Chris Badgett: And you are not even cowboying and doing it live.

Brad Williams: Right. Nothing has to go live unless you tell it to. You can draft content all day long. You can get really comfortable with the builder on your live website, essentially, though I would hope you are on a dev or staging environment just to be safe. Draft posts, work on that block content, nail it, call it “homepage two.” Do not publish it. As soon as you are ready for that homepage to go live, take your current live homepage and switch that to “homepage two,” and your new one to “homepage.” Your new homepage is live. You are not deploying anything. It is already there. You are just doing the old switcheroo.

Working With WebDev Studios and the SkyPilot Design Origin

Chris Badgett: What kind of clients does WebDev Studios work with, and how can somebody get in touch? And I want to note that at LifterLMS we hired WebDev Studios to redesign our entire website, and the SkyPilot theme that you are seeing, that design came from WebDev Studios.

Brad Williams: Thanks Chris. We work with clients honestly at all sizes. Our sweet spot is really that mid-market up to enterprise. That is where the bulk of our clients land. We have done a lot of enterprise over the years, but we are not only enterprise. We still have a number of clients we consider mid-market, good-sized companies that are not generally known brands.

Go to webdevstudios.com. Feel free to reach out. I am brad@webdevstudios.com. If you are interested in Theme Switcher, I am happy to set up a one-on-one demo. We can go through it, answer any questions, talk about how it may or may not work for you or your clients. We do everything from full-blown redesign rebuilds to ongoing support. We are our clients’ web team month in and month out, and this is where we are bringing things like Theme Switcher to the table.

Why Chris Recommends Starting With Your Blog

Chris Badgett: A great way to get started with Theme Switcher Pro is to commit to using it on your blog. Blogging in that way is a great way to learn how to work with the blocks and full site editing. That is a good place to start if you are on the fence. Theme Switcher now makes it easy to switch just your blog but not the whole website and all your landing pages and marketing pages.

Brad Williams: Agreed.

Chris Badgett: Theme Switcher Pro is at themeswitcher.com. The coupon code is LIFTERLMS. There is a 100% 30-day money-back guarantee, so even if you are not sure, just try it, test it out. Play around. Especially if you have ever been on the fence about switching from a page builder to full site editing, or figuring out how to do client work in smaller work chunks, this is a great tool. Brad and Mitch, thank you for the great demo. This is a design revolution. I wish this existed a decade ago. The best products come out of agency client needs or your own agency’s needs, and this is one of those.