424 – Revolutionising WordPress theme management with Brad Williams and Theme Switcher Pro

[00:00:20] Nathan Wrigley: Hello there, and welcome once again to the WP Builds podcast. You've reached episode number 424, entitled Revolutionizing WordPress Theme Management with Brad Williams and Theme Switcher Pro. It was published on Thursday, the 12th of June, 2025. My name's Nathan Wrigley and a few bits of housekeeping before we jump into the podcast with Brad.

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Okay, what have we got for you today? Well, today I am talking with Brad Williams. Brad Williams is a stalwart in the WordPress space. He's been around for many, many years. No doubt you've heard about him from various products, and podcasts and things like that.

And today we're talking about something called Theme Switcher Pro. And honestly, I've no idea why a product like this hasn't existed for ages. It enables you to have multiple themes happening at the same time on your WordPress website.

So this post over here could be legacy theme X, and this post over here could be brand new full site editing theme. And the idea is that you can mix and match. It might be something that you want to have permanently so that you can have multiple themes on a particular website. Or it might be something that you want to use as you are transitioning from your legacy theme to your brand new theme.

There's loads of different scenarios for how it might work, and we get into the weeds of how it's all put together, and I really do think this is something incredibly unique in the WordPress space, and so I hope that you enjoyed listening to Brad talk about it.

I am joined on the podcast by Brad Williams. Hello, Brad.

[00:04:45] Brad Williams: Hey Nathan, thanks for having me.

[00:04:46] Nathan Wrigley: Brad and I have I, we think we may have met in a corridor once, maybe. Not sure.

[00:04:51] Brad Williams: The hallway track at Word Camps. that's where everybody meets initially, and then we eventually podcast together, and then we become good

[00:04:58] Nathan Wrigley: that's it. We're gonna be

[00:04:59] Brad Williams: just the natural progression of WordPress people.

[00:05:02] Nathan Wrigley: Gonna be best friends after this. Brad Williams, if you don't know him, is a, it's like a complete stalwart in the WordPress space.

I, I don't quite know why. I know you. In other words, I don't know the initial moment that I, that your name became part of my. Vocabulary, but it's going back a long time. you are one of those people who just seems to have been around doing the right thing for a long time, so congratulations. Well done.

[00:05:31] Brad Williams: Thank you. we did it. Yeah. no, I appreciate that, Nathan. and I, you're right. we're in our 17th year as an agency, web dev studios, focused solely on WordPress, as, a platform. looking at that kind of mid-tier to enterprise level. type of projects.

so yeah, we've been around, we were back when we started in 2008, WordPress was very much blogging. It was a great blogging tool, and that's all it was. And it had very small market share, but it was out there. and that's where, started getting involved pretty early when that got very involved in the community, helped run a number of, word camps.

I'm in Philadelphia, I helped co organize the first five word Camp Phillies and, and helped co organize the first two word camp US events in Philadelphia. so really just getting out there and being involved in the community, in the space for, 17 plus years. just meet a lot of people, know a lot of people, a lot of people have heard of us, whether they worked with us or not.

They're just aware of some of the things we've done, especially publicly within the community and ways we've

contributed. and we maybe we'll get touch on some of that and how it might remove the need for serendipity and fluke, if you like, a little bit later. I, always, your agency web dev, it always comes up there's two or three names. That kind of have that same power, if you know who they are.

[00:06:54] Nathan Wrigley: I don't need to say them out loud, but you know who your competitors are, I'm sure. But, the, there's a, there's just a handful of those agencies that are like that enterprise level that you associate with the big websites, the important websites. And, I can only imagine how many, how many sleepless nights it has taken to create to forge that.

again,

[00:07:14] Brad Williams: Yeah, I mean it's, interesting because that wasn't the plan going in, right? It was just to build websites and have fun and work with good people. And then over time it just grew. It really, like timing and luck have a lot to do with everything in life, right? And business and life like. The, luck factor is always something that's so hard to, you can't plan for it.

but it's there, right? So the idea of wor, WordPress really started to grow and take off as we were starting to grow, as a company. So our kind of trajectory kinda lined up with WordPress as it's, as its market share grew, and certainly as bigger brands and companies started to look at WordPress as a viable option.

we were right there. at the top saying, Hey, this is all we do is WordPress. we're laser focused on it. We specialize in it. All the content, we write about it, we contribute, we release plugins. so everything we're doing. It is Focus was install is focused on WordPress.

So certainly early on that made us really stand out with some of those other agencies you talked about. And we're all friends, which is weird, but I know all those owners, we're all friends. We compete. It's fun, I like to beat those agencies. They like to beat me, right? It's a weird dynamic because we're all friendly.

We work together, like through the scale consortium, which we could talk about too, but in contributing to WordPress in the enterprise space around content. So while yes, we are competitors, I think it's an interesting dynamic in the WordPress space because even in the product space, you see it too within WordPress.

But we're, all friends. We're all friendly. We hang out at Word Camps. We've grown our businesses and grown up together in a sense and in many ways. I have monthly one-on-ones with a lot of other WordPress agency owners and it is just a place to. To vent, share advice, ideas with someone that is in a similar situation as me, that has to deal with things that, day in and day out, running a business.

And, you need to have someone at that level that you can share advice with and sometimes just vent, but somebody that's at that level that can understand 'cause they've been

[00:09:05] Nathan Wrigley: Really, truly bizarre. 'cause if you were to walk into almost any other industry where competition was the point, I suppose in a sense you, just have a completely different experience. everything would be locked down. There'd be none of those like Zoom calls that you've just described, everything

[00:09:20] Brad Williams: not working

[00:09:20] Nathan Wrigley: under cloak and dagger.

Oh

[00:09:22] Brad Williams: And I think hosting is more like that, right? 'cause hosting is definitely more cutthroat, even in the WordPress space. And I feel like hosting is just, it's been around longer than WordPress, right? It is. The beginning of the internet, there we're a host, right?

So I feel like there's just more of a cutthroat

[00:09:36] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:09:37] Brad Williams: But outside of that, yeah. it's the community really vibes together, and, I feel like we're all just trying to help each other figure this thing out as we go, which is the open source

[00:09:46] Nathan Wrigley: it is, you're right. Yeah, you're absolutely right. I do countless podcasts where that is the main thrust of it all, and it's absolutely fascinating that thing hangs together at all. It's completely brilliant. I feel so pleased that I ended up in the WordPress space.

and, also, imagine if we'd have hung our coats on a different CMS, we could, things could have worked out.

[00:10:06] Brad Williams: Yeah, who knows? it's hard to say 'cause it, back when we started, we were doing, different open source platforms. We definitely were focused on open source, but not only WordPress. So we were using Drupal Jula expression engine at the time. Zen Cartt, which I think expression engine was like dual license.

I don't think it was fully open source. But anyways, we're using a lot of different platforms and they all had this, single digit market share in some capacity. But then. Like you said, we really liked working with WordPress. It was intuitive, it was easy to develop on, easier than some of the other platforms.

And our clients really liked it. It was intuitive for them. So that's what really cemented the idea of we just need to go all in on WordPress. 'cause all the other platforms we're using Drupal Incar. The admin experience was very difficult. It was not intuitive. And again, this was, 15 plus years

[00:10:52] Nathan Wrigley: it just looked really ugly. Everything looked ugly in comparison to WordPress, I think.

[00:10:57] Brad Williams: Drupal was built. By developers for developers, right? Like it, it is an amazing tool that can build amazing things and it's come a long way, right? I don't wanna say current Drupal like this, but certainly I'm talking like Drupal six or five, we could build anything you want, but not super intuitive to the clients.

And a lot of the admin UI had to be crafted and built in a way customized for them, right? Which is just extra work. but you're right. It's interesting to see the path of these different projects

[00:11:23] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. thank you. That's an interesting little aside. We weren't intending to have that. We're, actually here today to talk about a, new product. and let me just get it out right our way. It is Theme Switcher Pro, and you're gonna find [email protected].

Neat name by the way. I'm quite, it's neat.

[00:11:42] Brad Williams: I was surprised that was available, so

[00:11:43] Nathan Wrigley: That just seems I saw it, I was like,

two words, two actual English words combined. okay. Give us the elevator pitch, tell the audience what it is and then we'll dig into how it works and maybe some of the constraints and things that it's best at.

[00:11:57] Brad Williams: Yeah, the elevator pitch is, it is a premium WordPress plugin that allows you to run multiple themes on a single installation of WordPress. So at, a highest level, that's what it does when you start to break it down, what that really means is, it means a lot of things, but the primary thing it means for us is we are, have seen a huge uptick in leads and even current clients that are wanting.

To transition to the block editor, the Gutenberg block editor, right? So there are still millions and millions of websites out there running classic WordPress. They have the classic editor. Plugin installed. They're still using the W together for all their content. it could even be the majority of WordPress websites.

I'd be very interested to know some of the numbers around that. But there are just millions of sites that are essentially stuck, right? They, maybe they like their website, maybe they like the look of it, maybe they don't, but they know they're. The editor is challenging. and they know the block editor exists at this point, right?

They don't know how to get there without the traditional, let's rebuild the website from the ground up. That's obviously one path to get there, of course. but what we've seen in the past couple of years is it's harder to get those type of budgets and projects approved. it's harder to say, Hey, we wanna rebuild a website because we want this new editor.

And maybe we will refresh the design a bit, but it's really because of the editor, like going up to your executive to say, we need to redo our website because the editor needs to be upgraded, is a tough sell. we devised this steam switcher. Really, it came from a client project, a couple client projects where we were like, Hey, why don't we.

Build out a system where we can selectively replace, pages, sections, templates within the website with a new theme. so what that would allow us to do is iteratively over time, so maybe six months, 12 months, we can replace specific sections from the classic editor to the new block editor. so a good example is.

I worked with a client, 90% of their traffic over 90% goes right to their article pages. It's a big media site. All their traffic goes right to the articles that they wanna read, right? So the homepage is very small amount of traffic. So we actually built out a new block theme for them. Mimic the header and footer.

Of the old site and then styled up all the blocks. And then we were able to selectively swap out just the single article template to use a new block-based theme. So the header and footer match, so to the end user on, or the visitor, there's no difference there. So it's not a jarring experience thinking they left the website.

but then all the content between the header and footer is using Gutenberg and the block editor. So this has like massively empowered their editors. It gave them, the, power of the block editor. and they only had to replace one, one template. With a new theme on their website.

So it took this project that could have easily been a six figure project and we're able to knock this out in a couple months. and this was again, before we fully productized this. So now it's just a matter of turning on this plugin. Downloading another theme into WordPress, into your themes directory.

Ollie's a good one. I like to use a good example. It's a great theme. and then you can immediately start producing new content using Ollie or another block theme. Immediately at the page level, you can say, I want this new about page to run whatever theme. You want. and as soon as you do that, it switches not only the front end, but it also reloads the whole backend because it has to load all those theme assets into the block editor.

Things like the blocks, the patterns, those all become available. So as soon as you say my new about page is gonna run on Ollie, even though the rest of my website's running classic WordPress classic editor. Now I have all the Ollie patterns, I have all the Ollie blocks. Within a couple clicks I've, launched a new landing page running Ollie.

and meanwhile the rest of my site's on the old system. So it's really empowered us, and our clients to, to approach these kind of revamps or upgrades in a very different way. I. And giving our clients options. So we've built Theme Switcher Pro as a standalone plugin, not only for us, but for website administrators.

They could use this directly on their own agencies. Freelancers could also use this, another tool in their belt to go their clients to say, Hey, we know you don't have the time or the budget to redo your whole website. We also know you want the block editor. We now have a solution where we can do this.

Iteratively and they could start producing block content as quickly as you wanna allow it. And honestly, within a matter of a few minutes on some sites, right? So you can install the plugin, download a theme, and start creating content with that theme immediately. So it just, it's a really big game changer.

There's a lot of use cases, a lot of ways you could use this, but at the base level, that's really what we're, how we're promoting it and using it. We also have clients using it just for landing pages. They have no intention of ever replacing their main theme. But they needed some themes that are more focused on landing page marketing materials.

So they're able to just launch rapid landing pages outside of their current theme and design again in a matter of hours. 'cause they're now able to use the block editor when before it would take a matter of weeks because they would have to build it all out in the classic editor and then get developers to come in behind them, and style it up, align those images, get it looking really good.

So it took weeks and developer support to get these things live. I'm sure people listening probably have similar experiences or have seen that. Theme Switcher Pro is another tool that could help with that, so.

[00:16:50] Nathan Wrigley: So from everything that you've just described, and I could be pausing this wrong and I probably am, in fact, it sounded like in the illustrations that you just gave you were going from a classic theme to block theme it.

Is there a constraint around that or can you do classic and another classic? Can you do block and another block? Am I just mishearing?

[00:17:12] Brad Williams: you could, be a psycho and go block the classic, it, a hundred percent works that way, right? So it is, it's very unopinionated, right? It is built to run themes and WordPress. and it's built in a way to be one, to be very performant. So we're running this on high traffic sites.

We have this on a VIP site, so that was very important to us, right? We can't in integrate something that just starts reloading themes without kind of considering. Performance impact what happens with massive amounts of load, right? So, it's built in a very, performant way. A lot of caching, integrations, to make sure that it's not always just querying to figure out what theme every page loads.

so a lot of, flexibility there in terms of how it would be, built, how it would be integrated. losing my train of thought here.

[00:17:56] Nathan Wrigley: It's okay, so I'll follow up with another question. okay. So any configuration of any kind of thing, we've got classic, we've got blocked. That's it. And I know what's gonna happen. I know what's gonna happen if it's possible. 25 themes each page with a different theme. It's inevitable. Not that you're gonna, not that you're gonna approve this message, but is that possible?

Could do possible, like in our, in, in our testing, my testing, internally, like it is, this is exactly what we're doing, right? Because it's impossible to say we've tested this on everyth theme and every scenario, right? There's just no way we can a hundred percent stand by that statement.

[00:18:34] Brad Williams: But what we can stand by is the fact that we built this per the WordPress coding standards, the API standards. We built this the right way. And we've done some massively thorough testing on the most popular classic themes and block themes and page builders. but there is no restrictions. You could have.

10 different block themes, 10 different classic things, themes running across all sorts of sites. The, only disclaimer there is just, to make sure you don't build yourself a Frankenstein that comes impossible to manage. but am I testing? Yeah. Homepage a different theme. running ASRA on the homepage, like 20, 23 on, single articles, I'm running Ollie on pages, on, on just a couple pages.

and it's neat when you start to see that. 'cause then it's Is it a realistic scenario? Not really, but the fact that it works and I can just, literally, every page I'm clicking on, it's, loading a different theme and giving me different options is mind blowing. It really starts to open up the idea of there's no real limits to what you can do here.

it's very, flexible. And that was the intention of

[00:19:30] Nathan Wrigley: I'm imagining a scenario where, inexperienced people are, I need like the Christmas theme, so I'll just, I'll, I'll have that, and then there's like an Easter theme. I quite like the look of, we'll load that one up as well, and, those are, those are fun examples because while the theme Switcher Pro has a built-in ui, it's, and it's very glo somewhat global, somewhat individual. So you can say it across all post types or across, I'm sorry, a specific post types. You can say, all right, all my posts are gonna run Ollie, right?

[00:20:00] Brad Williams: All my pages are gonna run whatever Astra. maybe you have a movies custom post type. All my movies are gonna run 2025, whatever. so it's very flexible on that. Now the UI is, it gives you some options like that around custom post types, around, taxonomy archives, and also around the front page swapping out your front page.

If you want to take it further and get even more granular, you can actually control this entire plugin via code. So it's very important to us, right? Like the idea of having an admin ui, that's great for testing and stuff, but most likely if you go into production with this, you don't want an admin to accidentally go in there and change some settings.

that could swap out themes or do something like that, right? So you could actually configure this through code and manage it through your git repositories, and that makes it even more granular. So now you're exposed to all, basically all the conditionals within WordPress. So you could, within the code, say, okay, if today is December 25th,

[00:20:49] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.

[00:20:49] Brad Williams: and the person's locale, if it's the, we're gonna run our Christmas theme.

And then the very next day it just switches back because it's a very much a time based, or you could say, we're making a joke. I'm actually working on a post for next month. There is a Friday the 13th. So one of the examples I'm gonna share is let's build a, a theme. A theme switcher pro integration that only runs on Friday the 13th.

So just with a couple lines of code and using the plugin, you can do that. So like just coming up with those silly. Fun, like unique? Is someone gonna do that? Probably not. But it's a good example of how flexible and granular this could be is you could even, you could say, Hey, if it's Nathan, he's logged in and Nathan comes back, Hey, I got a theme just for Nathan.

'cause he's such an important user, right? So you could, attach it to user accounts, you could attach it time of day. You could get real crazy and even hook into APIs and say, okay, if it's raining

wherever at, maybe you wanna show a rainy day theme. It sounds, it's, they're interesting examples, but when you start getting to the enterprise level of projects, this is what these companies are doing.

we worked with a very large company that sells soup, really good soup, right? and they know that on, they have the data, the back of the up. But if it is a rainy, cold day soup, sales go up a hundred guaranteed soup sales go up, right? Now imagine integrating environmental API data,

[00:22:06] Nathan Wrigley: Oh we did on some of their websites, to say, Hey, Brad's logged in from Philadelphia.

[00:22:10] Brad Williams: It's raining and cold in Philly right now. Let's put a nice hero section of big warm bowl of soup with the steam coming off of it, and it converts. there is data that converts. So While it sounds a little bit silly, but would you get an enterprise? These are the things that they're looking at and doing because of that type of market analysis, research, psychological, like when people buy stuff and why they, research all that.

They know that, so they like to try things like that. Say, Hey, let's, yeah, let's

integrate it did sound silly until you backed it up with the, soup example,

it does, right? But yeah, that's.

[00:22:46] Nathan Wrigley: sound silly at all. You know if you That's one of my favorite examples. 'cause people don't think about you, think about, oh, like location based. Okay. If you're in the US or in Europe, things change. Okay. That's pretty standard. But it knows it's raining where I'm at and it's convert changing things because of that.

[00:23:03] Brad Williams: that is a lot of, not only where the web has been going, but I think it's gonna continue to go that way, that ultra. Personalized

[00:23:10] Nathan Wrigley: I was just about to say, yeah,

[00:23:11] Brad Williams: So it's taking it even further, almost, maybe even a scary level. if it's, if websites start to, oh, it's every time I log into a website it's always raining because it's raining outside.

[00:23:20] Nathan Wrigley: right.

[00:23:20] Brad Williams: I don't know if that's a good thing or not, but

[00:23:22] Nathan Wrigley: One, one thing about the name of the plugin, so it's called Theme Switcher Pro. Whe when I, came across the name I, and then read a little bit about it, it felt like the product really was to try and guide you from, okay, there's the theme. You're stuck with, here's the theme you're trying to get to.

It felt like that. but I don't know, I, from everything that you've just said, it, it feels like you are also leaning into No, have two themes and just keep running with two themes, or are you trying to, is it more of a bridging solution for, okay, you've got a million posts on this web, one website.

You want to take it easy. You just want to ease your way into this new theme. I didn't know if it was one or both, or either.

[00:24:05] Brad Williams: it's really both. I think that really, that, that's part of, I think, the marketing challenge around, it's a new product, a new idea is making it clear that there are, options here. So the idea of if, and it really comes down to making sure you have a plan or at least an idea of what your goal is when you're using a plugin like this, right?

Like for someone where we're trying to transition them fully off a classic editor over to the block editor, the end goal is that we. We deactivate this plugin and fully activate the block editor theme and. And remove the classic theme, completely delete it, right? That's the end goal. because we do wanna sunset the old theme, and once the new theme is fully online, running the entire website, it's as simple as removing our plugin and just activating the theme and you're done right Now.

I also mentioned like the landing page examples. those type of clients and those integrations, they don't have any plans to remove theme switcher. They're just using it to run multiple themes. One for their landing campaigns and one for their primary website. It is absolutely a tool that could stay on your website forever, that you just wanna run multiple themes.

A good example, I had a great conversation with Chris Badgett over at Lifter. this is an awesome example and we're gonna work up some content to really show this, but one of the challenges with Lifter, it's an amazing plugin, an LMS Learning Management System for WordPress, it's a plugin, right? So if I have an established website and I want to, integrate a learning management system, and I activate Lifter, they have a lifter theme called Sky Pilot.

It's designed, works amazing. With Lifter, everything just works well with the platform. The problem is you can only run Sky Pilot as your

[00:25:34] Nathan Wrigley: right, of course.

[00:25:35] Brad Williams: get people to use it, they have to activate it and replace your theme, which almost nobody

[00:25:39] Nathan Wrigley: That's a perfect example.

[00:25:41] Brad Williams: Now Lifter has a great option.

Hey, if you don't want to do that using Theme Switcher Pro, you can use our theme just for the LMS sections of your website. So those are other use cases where I could see people using theme switcher Pro permanently LMSs WooCommerce, which we're doing a lot of testing on. Now. It's partial support, but we're expecting to have full support probably in a few weeks.

WooCommerce, maybe use a WooCommerce theme just for, your store,

[00:26:04] Nathan Wrigley: that, that's so under slash store and anything under the store runs WooCommerce theme and everything else runs whatever theme you're, currently running. So it's

that's such a good example. The LMS example is perfect because we all know that the back, it's fairly minimal what you need back in there, isn't it? You just wanna lay out the courses and what have you, but on the front end, there's probably a lot more design work that needs to go into the actual

[00:26:24] Brad Williams: There is, there's the coursework, there's like the login, the whole path to doing courses, the certification, receiving the dashboard areas. Like all of that is been, they've made sure, of course, as you expect their theme, it looks beautiful on all of those sections, all those pages. Your theme most likely will not, it'll look okay, but it's not gonna look really tight and just amazing outta the box, right?

so this gives them an option. So working on partnership deals with different products. where that's a really good fit because now our product can help lifter, potentially make more sales.

[00:26:55] Nathan Wrigley: that's a So that's definitely some partnership angles we're exploring and talking to. But any product out there that's like that.

[00:27:00] Brad Williams: Traditionally, the only other answer would be either subdomain it and have a separate install completely or multi-site, WordPress multi-site, which again, it's like a separate install. It's in the network of course, but it's and we love multi-site. Just to be clear, this is not a replacement for multi-site, but this very much could be an alternative to multi-site.

If the only reason you're using multi-site is to do something like I just described, this could be an alternative. We don't need to go down that road and you can just run a different theme for those features.

[00:27:26] Nathan Wrigley: need to quickly go out and buy the domain, multiple theme.com or something like that. I dunno, because it does feel, it feels The switch a bit. the move from one to the other is, gonna become a subset of what it does it, I really have an intuition that if we were to come back and do this podcast again in a couple of years, I'm predicting, I could be completely wrong.

I'm predicting that a lot of your users will be running multiple themes intentionally with no, intuition to switch any of them off.

[00:27:56] Brad Williams: there's no real downside to it. Like I said, it's built very performant, so the only real thing you need to make sure is if you're running two, two themes, you're, managing two code bases right now. If it's another theme off the shelf, you know they're gonna push out updates.

You just need to make sure you test 'em and update it. But if it's your own code base, and of course you know now you have two, two code bases, you need to. To, support, but, but that's all you need to really think about is how do you support this integrated in? I do again, think this is a really interesting tool for freelancers and other companies, not just for us to use, but for other companies to use.

Because again, if your client's stuck and they're saying, look, I can't afford to rebuild. All right, let's use this plugin. Maybe we just again, mimic your header, footer and style up theme, JSON, so much more minimal project, and then they can start producing content using that new block theme almost immediately.

And then you help them chip

[00:28:43] Nathan Wrigley: Right, and you can

[00:28:44] Brad Williams: a nice ongoing the website migration process to this new theme over 12 months instead of, it's all gotta be done by, I don't know, a month from today. It can be. Okay. We'll tackle, the, posts on month one. We'll tackle some of these subset of

So it gives you some nice ongoing work retainer style work. it, it works and it's a good solution for your clients knowing, it's more budget friendly. It also, it's not just money thing, it's a time thing, right? Like rebuilding a website is a massive amount of time and focus that company or those people the company have to spend with you and your team to do it right.

That the time is a cost too, not just the dollar amount that they're spending on it. So you also, it also allows us to, hey, we can do this and I don't need your laser focused attention for three months. we're gonna chip away at this. All I need is some direction decisions on what sections we wanna start with.

Some people like to go all in on the most impactful sections. Some wanna start maybe let's just do our about page, and

[00:29:36] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. Ex exactly that. Yeah, exactly that, that seems like the perfect example. So on the inside, if you're logged into WordPress, you activate a theme and then the theme is the thing. And, if, it's the classic thing you hit heading into the customizer to mess about things, and if it's the, it's the block theme.

You're in the site editor and you've just got that one place where you go, how does this work? how do you interact and customize. One of the themes and then flip over and customize the other. How does it actually work?

[00:30:06] Brad Williams: Yeah, that's another good question. 'cause some themes you activate and they just are what they are. Like I think the core themes are pretty. A good example of that, right? 2025. It's a nice looking theme. It is what it is. There's not really options sections, it just all uses the, block editor.

yeah, so basically within the plugin we have some debug settings. 'cause that was something we realized early on. what if the setting, what if the theme has settings, right? Not block editor, but like actual settings. In the theme section, how do we get to that? 'cause we have to get in there and configure it.

So we've actually built, within the tool, we have a couple debug features. One's a debug bar that kind of shows you what's going on. Here's your main theme, here's what switched and here's why. So if you're debugging, gives you a little bit of insight. But the other feature, which is really powerful, is a theme previewer.

So you can actually, on your front end, if you enable this, you can pick any theme you have and just flip the front end on it. It's not gonna save, it is just a look at it. And I will say the caveat is, if you flip like a classic page and say, all right, let's see what this looks like in Otter. It's not using blocks, right?

But it is gonna incorporate all those otter styling. So it's interesting to preview and play, but what we discovered is it's a great solution for the admin. So you can go into the admin and say, let me preview Otter. On the dashboard and then it loads Otter and now I can go into the settings, make any changes I want, and it saves them where it needs to.

And then you're done. The other thing we came across too, and Otter is another good example. Many themes are like this where, it's more, site editor integration, right? So if I'm building a one page on Otter, but the rest of my sites run into something else, but one page, there's also this kind of higher, higher up.

Template in the hierarchy of, header footer stuff, right? 'cause it has, Otter is a full sighter, like you have the header footer kind of baked into your template, Again, within the block editor, you can, see that the, template is attached to, and you can go right into the block editor and edit it that way too.

Ollie has a base, footer that has hardcoded links to Ollie. So I was able to edit that template and just remove them and update them. So I launched part of my, marketing campaign around this we're working on is on theme switcher.com. We're building and launching landing pages using different themes just to show it like, here it is, here's the theme.

I'll run it on our site. run it through page speed insights, test it out, see what you think, but just to show that off. So we have an Ali one we've launched and I'm working on a few others, but again. I put Ollie the theme on theme switcher.com, set up the conditional switch logic and create a new page and just change the content.

So it's theme switcher specific, and it took me maybe 20 to 30 minutes of between putting Ollie on the site to actually publishing that. So it's such a game changer when you realize how quickly you can start producing block content when you weren't able to prior to

[00:32:51] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think that's gonna be a big, it would certainly be, if I was in charge of this project, that would be a big part of the blog posting that I'd be doing is, you know, leaning into the new, it's not new anymore, the block editor and trying to convert people over to the power of blocks and what have

[00:33:07] Brad Williams: Yeah, that's the big push is classic to blocks. But like you said, it's, it could be block to block, it could be five different block themes and there's there for different reasons. Like it doesn't have to be classic to block, it's just

[00:33:17] Nathan Wrigley: gonna get such

[00:33:18] Brad Williams: themes and you setting the conditionals.

[00:33:20] Nathan Wrigley: Just I've these reason why we went, I know, and that's honestly a very conscious decision on why we did not release a version on.org. because there is a, there's a pretty, there could be a significant support element to this, right? So I wanna make sure one, we're putting our best foot forward with support.

[00:33:37] Brad Williams: It's not just the freeform support, right? so there's a cost to this, and, it's to make sure, one, you're buying it from us. You're, we're a reputable company. We've been doing this for a long, time. But two, I, have a, an amazing support team that's here to help you, right? So I wanna make sure we're building an amazing product, but also helping you, with whatever that integration of the product looks like.

We want you to use it, of course, we want you to, Have some success with it, so we're here to help.

[00:34:01] Nathan Wrigley: the the interesting thing here is why the heck has it been until the year 2025 for somebody to come up with what, on the face of it seems like a bit of a no brainer idea. maybe somebody's tried this in the past and failed. I've not heard of that.

[00:34:17] Brad Williams: It is not as easy

[00:34:18] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, okay. Here we go.

[00:34:19] Brad Williams: it was, I'm not just, I'm not saying it was technically that was the reason there isn't this 'cause I was do, we did a lot of market research on this and I'm just like, look, there are ways to switch themes. There's a few random plugins out there. and we tested 'em all out and they're not built.

For block editor, they somewhat work a little bit, but the hardest, the most technical, the hardest piece of this build of building this product was the block editor. And actually what happens when you switch the theme in the block editor or in the editor period, because like we said, all those assets have to load and they have to load at the right.

Exact right load order to work. and it's not just hook on this filter and you're done. It was a bit more complicated than that. Quite a bit more complicated. So we spent a lot of time on that integration piece because even again, you switch that theme. And if you just hit save draft as soon, it's gonna switch the theme in the backend and it, the things that happen behind the scenes, it's a lot like it's loading in the entire theme.

It's loading in all the patterns and styles and blocks that come with that theme. And anything else with that comes with that theme in the editor. I. Even though it just looks like the normal block editor, all that stuff has just happened behind the scenes and that was a big technical lift. So while just saying, Hey, activate this theme, instead of that theme is one line of code and WordPress that is, very much missing the point.

And, you're gonna have a bad time if that's all you're doing. 'cause it's not actually gonna load what you need. Blocks will not work. You're gonna have a lot of problems. We really built this to work with modern WordPress, work with classic WordPress, and really build it by devs, four devs. It's solid product.

And you're, right. I don't know why someone hasn't really come across this. I thought maybe I was missing something. but everything I've found talks about a plugin that's older and barely supports a block editor and is not something I would ever even consider on production. plus a lot of times, yeah, and a lot of, when we look at plugins for our clients, I wanna make sure there's a company behind it.

I wanna make sure there's a team. I wanna make sure it's, well supported before I bring that to a client. So that is also the difference between something.org. Which doesn't mean it's not well supported, but many times there's one or two des behind it and they just throw things out there. and it may not be, there's no pro support, Or premium. So you want put this out there. This is a solid product built by, a reputable company with a name that you can trust.

[00:36:27] Nathan Wrigley: It is curious. I dunno if you do the same thing as I do, but when I go to a new website, nothing specifically to do with WordPress, but I definitely do it when I find new plugins. One of the My journey is land on website. Then I go, basically, I end up on the pricing page more or less immediately, and then the next thing I do is to try and find the about us page.

That is my journey, because first of all, I wanna know can I afford it? And then if the answer's yes to that, I wanna know who these people

[00:36:52] Brad Williams: Who's behind it?

[00:36:53] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I do. I really do

[00:36:54] Brad Williams: That's solid advice be. There's a lot of anonymous stuff out there around WordPress, and some of it may be amazing, but you're right. If you don't know who's behind it, if there's not even one person's name, then I then red flags start to go off. Like, why are they being anonymous?

Why would they not wanna put their name on it, And then I start to wonder, did they build this, or maybe they stole this from someone and it's not even their product, Or who knows what. So I a hundred percent agree. I will stay away from any products, premium products, things I have to pay money for and I wanna bring to my clients, unless I know there's a team behind it and they're being public about it.

[00:37:26] Nathan Wrigley: that kind of leads me to my next, it's not really a question, it's more of an observation. And that is that every week I get email, 'cause I run this podcast from people who have a thing, they've built a thing and they're trying to get traction for the thing. And 90 times out of a hundred, I could have said nine outta 10.

I dunno why I didn't, it, gets nowhere how, there's no traction. It, even if I pick it up, it doesn't run you on the other hand. you announced this thing and I can't stop seeing it everywhere I go, everybody's, I'm not joking. Brad, this is I love to hear it. That's the marketing machine

That's the marketing machine.

But something happened, you invented this. either the product is so stupendously brilliant and such a revolutionary thing that everybody thought, wow, this is worth retweeting or what have you. But I'm curious, like we were talking about the, about, and the heritage and the fact that, you can trust this company.

I think you have, you've arrived at that beautiful spot where you've done so much work, you've got so much heritage. Your back catalog just shouts. Look at what we did. you've just done loads that the minute you announce something new, it's just credible out the box. I'm not trying to blow your own trumpet for you, but I

just did. keep going. Keep going, Nathan. I appreciate it. This is great. it's a great, it's an interesting question and, not one I'd. I guess I had thought about it a little bit because to be fair, I haven't been as public the last few years online. I haven't been as involved in social media trying to get a little away from it, especially with politics and trying to focus on non doom and gloom every minute of my day.

[00:39:05] Brad Williams: so I've been a little bit less, public about just things, and things I'm working on, but I wanted to change that because I always. Enjoyed being more out in public. I've always really loved doing podcasting and just talking tech and geeking out. I've, been doing this forever. so I enjoy doing that.

So I to be to, so that being said, I didn't know if we would get a lot of traction with this. I think to your point, one of the reasons it's taken off and there's a lot of traction, is this an interesting idea that most people said. W Yeah, this, makes a ton of sense. Why has no one done this before? So I feel like it's clicking with a lot of people, like this is a need.

'cause we've all come across these type of projects or these type of sites, right? Classic editor, how do I get to the block editor without dropping a ton of money and spending, months and whatever. just, understand that. And too, you're right, just having the, having been around as long as we have, having been involved, we're not just a company that's been.

working with WordPress, we're very involved in WordPress and we have been from the start so early on when nobody knew who we were. we just started, going to, events as Word Camp started to, really just started, started to pop up and started to get a little more popular back in the day.

We started going to events and I've always been a really big fan of just sharing, especially around technology, sharing knowledge and learning from others. I grew up, I'm Gen X, I grew up learning to program and message boards, in forums, and that's how we learned, right? we didn't have YouTube, we didn't have all these programming books.

There was a few here and there. but we learned the message boards and how do I went from asking a bunch of questions to answering a bunch of questions over the years. And I feel like that is what in some way really got me into open source, even though I didn't realize it. Because that is, open source is like helping each other and working together, right?

understanding how to find that information out there and, you really get our name out there, but just getting involved, getting our name out there, speaking at events. I started a local meetup here in Philadelphia. I ended up helping co organize and starting the first five word camp.

Philadelphias helped organize the first two word camp uss in Philadelphia. I. Helped organize the first couple word session events way back when, wrote a couple books on WordPress, just like getting involved and geeking out on it and just, podcasting for years and years. but to your point, I think there is, there's, there certainly is credibility around a company like ours that have been around for a while, worked with these larger brands, and have been around the space as long as we have.

so I was excited to see the reaction because I honestly didn't know, 'cause I haven't been putting as much stuff out there, so I'm like, maybe nobody cares what I'm doing anymore. No, maybe nobody cares what we're

[00:41:30] Nathan Wrigley: I am telling

[00:41:31] Brad Williams: But clearly people do 'cause.

[00:41:33] Nathan Wrigley: It's really, I cannot avoid it. maybe it's dying down now as people have figured out what it is, but in the initial, as soon as you mentioned it. It, obviously we've all got our own Twitter feeds or whatever, and so the algorithm's kinda shaping that a little bit, but I couldn't avoid it.

It was literally everywhere and so you did a great job there. Whatever the serendipitous nature of how that

[00:41:56] Brad Williams: Still going, but it is an educational thing too, so it's important to get out there and explain it to people and make sure they're understand. 'cause it is, it can, it's something that can do a lot of different things and sometimes that's hard to market. So definitely homing in on that classic de Gutenberg experience, but as we talked about, there's just so many different options for

[00:42:14] Nathan Wrigley: let's get onto pricing 'cause we mentioned that. Can I just say don't, you don't need to look at the about us page dear. Listen, it's all fine. but we'll go to the pricing page 'cause that bit is interesting. And, and this is also very interesting. This is something that did catch my attention.

'cause you've definitely gone in on the, They're more en, I don't know if this is like enterprise, I, don't even know what I'm gonna say here, but you're starting off at 2 9 9. tell us around that. I think it's just the one website, but Pres, presumably you can

[00:42:43] Brad Williams: Yeah. So outta the box is, yeah, it's 2 99 a year per website. Per year. we are doing half off, launch special. So if you're interested in checking it out, get that down to about one 50 and then we do 600 for up to five sites. so it is on the premium side in the WordPress space.

Absolutely. And this is something I, internally we talked about, kinda went round and round about, there's a lot of ways, it's interesting because there's so much. Pricing is such an interesting topic, right? And I looked, I researched a lot of other plugins, what people are doing, how they're doing it.

It's funny because we sell another plugin that's $99, but we do it every six months and nobody talks about that price,

[00:43:23] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, it's still 200 a really interesting.

[00:43:26] Brad Williams: And so I was debating, should I do one 50 every, but I was like, you know what? I just wanna do annual. This is a valuable tool, right? there is a value to this tool, whether it's just you're buying it for yourself or your own website, or you're buying it for, certainly if you're buying it for a freelance to, as a, to work with your clients, right?

This is a tool you bring to your clients, eh, one, get them to pay for it, right? but two, like I said, this can open up more work for you. this brings options. Yeah. I always talk to our clients about, we have a lot of tools in our bat belt, right? But I don't want to tell you what tool we're gonna use until we really understand your goals and what we're looking to accomplish.

'cause how can I say this is what we need to do when I don't even understand what you're trying to do. this is another tool in your bat belt, right? So if your client says you really wanna get the block editor's not sure how to get there, Hey, I have an option, client 300 bucks a year.

And then we talk about what Demi want to do and I'll help you set it up and integrate it and off you go with blocks, right? So, it is on the more premium side is it? is it, is that gonna last? Is it correct? I don't know. we're just figuring this out. So I do want to get a lot of users going to get as much feedback as we can, so we're getting a pretty steep discount half off.

but we'll see. it might, evolve, but I think we want, this is a professional tool. We wanna make sure that it's clear. It's you, it's, it's for people that are really looking to, enhance their It kinda strikes me that if you could use this as a migration tool, and then maybe if you just had the one license, if you were literally migrating a site and you were giving yourself, I know it's three month window to take site from classic to block, you could presumably within that license, you could move it from one website to another.

[00:44:56] Nathan Wrigley: is that possible under the licensing or

[00:44:58] Brad Williams: absolutely. It's just, it just registers the main website. we don't count dev sites, so local hosts, stuff like that, like sh will not matter. but yeah, absolutely. It's just attached to the website. So if you wanted to do it, for a client and after a few months you, you could easily, re-register a new site for that license, whenever you want.

It's your license. It's not locked into one single website. So you just tell us the site.

[00:45:19] Nathan Wrigley: So there's another option at the moment. So that was the, theme Switcher license, as it's called. The other option is agency, which is up to five websites, and currently that's being priced at 5 9 9. But if you do get in under the wire of, I think they're offering it 50%

off.

for the first 50 or so, then obviously that will be considerably less.

theme switcher.com/pricing. Is where you're gonna find that. And, I think I've run through all the questions that I was thinking needed to be asked. Did I miss anything? Is there any feature that I just didn't drag out of you?

[00:45:50] Brad Williams: I think you covered it pretty well. the, Definitely check out the site. We've been putting out more videos and I plan to continue pushing on that because I just like really short sweep, impactful, few minute videos. So we have a couple videos on our YouTube channel, that really, again within a couple minutes show exactly what we're doing here.

So I have one video that's block to block theme and one video that's classic editor to block theme. and by the second minute. we're creating content with blocks, and we start from activating the plugin. So it's pretty cool to see how quickly that happens. So I'm gonna keep pu pushing out more videos, so definitely check out, web dev studios on YouTube.

Got a lot of documentation.

[00:46:27] Nathan Wrigley: that was the other

[00:46:28] Brad Williams: thing on the website,

[00:46:29] Nathan Wrigley: miss that. So the support, that was the other thing that I always

[00:46:32] Brad Williams: Yeah, so we have a lot of documentation. We're gonna continue to expand that. We have an example plugin, so I mentioned you can custom code. We have an example plugin you can download. and it's got, you can literally activate it and start using it, but it's a good jumping off point for that custom code stuff.

So again, that's, that comes with it. Just a lot on the website, but, if anyone has any questions, I'm very, very accessible, very approachable on Twitter, blue Sky, wherever. Just look, me up, Brad Williams, LinkedIn. happy to, even if it's just, if you want a quick 10 minute, one-on-one demo session.

I've been doing some of those as well, so I.

[00:47:03] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, nice, You yeah, 'cause I, again, it's Yeah. That's great. Yeah.

[00:47:08] Brad Williams: And we do have the white glove on the website, so people are like, look, we want this, but we need someone to help us. That's where web dev studios comes in, right? So we come in and whether it's rebuilding the whole side or we're working with the nonprofit now, we're, I, I mentioned just building out a new block theme with the header and footer.

That match and then styling up the blocks, that's exactly what we're doing. And then we're gonna hand it off to them and they're gonna start, transitioning on their own. So it's a very kind of low cost effort to get a block theme for them that fits their branding, fits their website, and then they can go off on their own and run with it.

got a lot of options there, but if you need help, definitely reach out. We're here to help. However we can.

[00:47:39] Nathan Wrigley: you so much. So once more, theme switcher.com is the website and, go and check it out as loads of documentation, loads of support, and some YouTube channel, but as well by the sounds of it that you can check to see exactly how it is done. That's all we got then in that case. Brad Williams, thank you very much for chatting to me today.

I wish you all the best. I'm sure it'll be a great success.

[00:48:00] Brad Williams: Yeah. Thanks so much, Nathan. This was a lot of fun.

[00:48:02] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, that's all we've got time for. I hope you enjoyed listening to Brad talk about Theme Switcher Pro. If you've got any commentary on that, head to WPbuilds.com. Search for episode number 4 2 4, and leave us a comment there. We'd really appreciate it.

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Okay. That's very nearly the end of the episode. I've really appreciated having you around. Like I said, if you want to get in touch with me because you saw me at WordCamp Europe, really appreciate that. Over on X, it's @wpbuilds, and on Bluesky @ nathanwrigley.com. Reach out. I would love to stay in touch.

Don't forget also, if you want to find out about advertising, head to wpbuilds.com/advertise.

Okey dokey, that really is it. It only remains for me to find some incredibly cheesy music and to fade it in. Here it comes, and I'm going to say, stay safe. Have a good week. Bye-bye for now.