[ad_1]
I am experienced with html/css/javascript and building sites from scratch. I’ve never used WordPress. I got asked to potentially work on a website thats created/hosted by WordPress and just had a call with the person in charge of the site. They have several changes they want to make that I know I could do if I could actually make changes to the actual html/css. Is there a way to do this? They were changing themes and it seemed like it was pulling info from a web server but I couldn’t really see a way to edit the files themselves. Thanks!
[ad_2]
I’m going to tell you right now that making changes to the actual files is almost certainly *NOT* the correct thing to do. As a matter of fact, I’d be willing to bet that, if you DO find the correct files, you won’t find what you’re looking for, since most of the content of WordPress is stored in the database.
Without knowing more about exactly what it is that you’re trying to do, what theme they’re using, etc., no one is going to be able to help you.
Whether the site is hosted through WordPress.com or is using WP as a standalone CMS on traditional hosting will slightly change how you have to go about it.
Either way, the way you edit a WordPress site properly is by using either a custom theme or a child theme of a third party one. The HTML (rather, HTML in PHP templates) and CSS is in the theme and there are usually discrete pages and post templates. If the functionality of a given page isn’t changing, only the layout and styling, you should only need to really mess with the HTML aspect of the template and just rearrange the existing WP functions and template tags. If you need to really change up the template to pull different data/content from different places or modify how the content is rendered, then you’re going to have to get familiar with WP’s PHP functions and template tags.
The WP Codex has decent beginner guides to this kind of thing and if you understand basic JS programming, PHP shouldn’t be too hard to pick up since you’re just dealing with different syntax and APIs.
Whatever you do, don’t make changes to a theme or plugins you didn’t create that receives updates from the original author. Every time the theme or plugins updates your customizations will be wiped. If you want to maintain the general features and design of the site with the current theme, create a child theme of it and overwrite whatever you need in that.
You can install a WP Code Snippet plugin, and it will let you add custom html and css, without altering the theme files (which need to remain untouched so they can receive auto-updates).
Some of the CSS/JS plugins allow you to drop-in your own stylesheet into the header.
Ideally what you want is to install a theme like Kadence, Elementor, Astra, or Divi, which allows you to work with the design, without evening needing to write any html or css.