Appearance contains everything that affects the visual side. It has five sub-items of very different importance.
Themes
The theme decides how the whole website looks. The active one is listed first.
Don’t switch themes on a live website without a backup. The switch can lose settings, widgets and layout — especially if the website was built with a page builder.
Child theme. If someone built your website for you, it probably has one. It is a theme that inherits the main one but keeps your changes separately — so updating the main theme doesn’t wipe them out.
If you see two themes with similar names, one of them with “Child” — the child should be the active one.
Customize
Live editing — you see how it looks while you make changes. The safest place in the whole of Appearance.
It usually contains: the logo, colours, fonts, the footer, the header image.
Nothing is saved until you click Publish. If you close it — the changes are lost. That is also a safety net: experiment freely.
Menus — the most used part
This is where you decide what goes in the navigation.
How to add an item: on the left, pick a page, click “Add to Menu”, then drag it into place.
Submenus: drag an item slightly to the right under another one. It becomes a sub-item that appears on hover.
Custom links: for external addresses or a phone number. For a call: tel:+38970123456
Menu location: at the bottom there is a “Display location” field — primary menu, footer, mobile. A menu that isn’t assigned to a location isn’t shown anywhere. That is the most common reason for “I made a menu and it isn’t there”.
Widgets
Small blocks in a sidebar or footer: latest posts, categories, contact details, an image.
In newer versions widgets are edited with blocks, like posts. If you find that awkward, the “Classic Widgets” plugin brings back the old way.
If the website was built with a page builder, widgets may not be used at all. Then don’t bother with them.
Theme File Editor — the most dangerous button
This item opens code editing directly in the browser.
One wrong semicolon and the website is a white page. No undo, no warning. And if you have lost the admin as well, the fix has to go through FTP.
Tip: ask for it to be switched off completely. In wp-config.php:
define('DISALLOW_FILE_EDIT', true);
That hides both editors. If someone steals your admin password, they won’t be able to inject code this way — and this is one of the most common points of attack.
The order to work in
If you are changing the look: first Customize (safe), then Menus (safe), and only if there is no other way — code, over FTP, with a backup.
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