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I am an admin for our company’s website, built by a web designer we can no longer contact. Our theme is old and needs to be updated, but we purchased it apparently under his name so it appears we need to purchase the theme again in our name. WP Bakery was included with our theme, and is how the website was built, and it also needs updates. If I preview an updated version of our existing theme, it just displays code and loses all customization. What steps should I take, in order, of keeping the customization and purchasing/updating the theme and WP Bakery and not breaking the site?
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I’ve been in this exact situation. The company that our company contracted with created a child theme of the original theme and some parts of it had to be updated with the main theme having been updated. I did that manually.
If your company applied the changes directly to the theme itself, then updating the theme will “undo” those changes.
Worst possible outcome you’ll need to run a local copy of WordPress, install the new theme and manually replicate the changes yourself either in the customized or to a child theme.
This was initially the point of the parent/child relationship with themes. So that you could keep the main theme updated but still run a variant with all your changes.