making an existing (non-responsive) WP site responsive

The advice may be a few years old, but it’s still correct today.

A ‘responsive” site only means that the CSS has media queries set up that kick in at specified screen widths, and that the HTML code will accomodate those changes. 99% of the changes that you’d do would be in the CSS code, but there may be some small HTML changes needed in order for the responsivness to function the right way.

As for how to develop it, I would recommend using a development site that is separate to the live site. It doesn’t matter if it’s on your locla PC there, on a separete domain or as a sub-domain of the existing domain. it just makes things easier, and takes away any issues of problems if something does go wrong while you’re making the changes (don’t want to break the live site do you?).

Thank you catacaustic. It seems like you are saying that the plugin option is not advisable – or did I read you wrong on that?

Additionally, I’ve also read that if I were to apply a WP child theme which were responsive and use the existing theme as the parent theme, but make no changes – simply apply the responsive child theme – that the site would look and function as it now does but would be responsive, because the child theme is responsive. Does this make sense?

Seems to me I’d still have to make css and potentially html changes to the child theme, or does the responsiveness of the child theme somehow supercede the non-responsiveness of the older parent theme?

Sorry for being so naive, much appreciate the advice.

The plugins are a valid option, but they won’t give you the same result as doing a properly designed responsive layout. If that’s what your budget and/or skills are up to, then I have seen them do some pretty decent jobs before.

The child theme idea for making an existing no-repsonsive theme into a responsive one is a very good idea. Using a child theme for any changes is always the best way to do things as any changes you make to a theme will be wiped out the next time the theme updates.

And yes, there will be CSS changes to do. Not really to the dsktop site, but adding in the varioous media query rules for the size break points to get the markup to render the way that it’s meant to on smaller devices. That is pretty much all CSS. You may need to do some HTML updates only if there’s something that the existing markup doesn’t allow for when you set up the responive layouts.

Thanks catacaustic. I’ve found out that the existing theme they are using is called Xtreme1 Theme, made by MarketPress. They are also running a child theme named Xtreme Blank Child Theme.

I’ve looked up these themes and found out a few things:

On the MarketPress website they say that there is a release of Xtreme1 called 1.6, from early 2014. In the documentation they write “YAML 4- Xtreme One 1.6 now has full YAML 4 support. The YAML version 3 has been removed for better compatibility for your own CSS or your own CSS framework. This brings more flexibility and gives you the freedom to make your own Child Themes also responsive.” I also found “Responsive Themes –
Xtreme 1.6 is now with the YAML 4 integration responsive. All child themes have also been adapted and optimized for mobile.”

https://marketpress.com/support/topic/xtreme-one-1-6-news/

They also have a list of their available child themes, and Xtreme Blank Child Theme is not among them.

I am trying to verify what version of Xtreme1 is being used on the website, but currently I don’t have administrator access on the WP backend. Hopefully they assign that soon.

Assuming that the parent theme needs to be updated, it seems from the documentation I listed above that if I update to 1.6 and use a current child theme, the site will be responsive. Does this seem accurate to you?

Do you know if I were to change to one of their currently supported child themes, would this affect the look of the website? Would I perhaps need to copy the CSS from the current child theme and paste that into the newer child theme? In this case would I simply download a new child theme, make those changes and then activate the new child theme?

Thanks again, your feedback is really helpful.

I can’t say about a commercial theme. Unfortunately no one else here can either.

To find out what you’re looking for you will really need to ask the themes authors.

Thanks catacaustic, I understand.

Can you say in a more general fashion, if adjusting preferences to a theme in the WP admin panel would result in losing existing settings? It seems to me that it would logical to assume that if I were to experiment with checking a checkbox which is provided to me as an option in a theme’s preferences (for a theme which was currently active) and make no other changes, I could simply uncheck that option if the results were unsatisfactory and the theme (thus live website) would revert to its previous state.

So I am not asking about a specific theme but more about the way the admin backend works in general. Any thoughts?

Thanks