Preserving theme settings in your child theme
Child themes can save the day. You can use them to make code changes and ensure they will work when you need to update your theme. We have included a premade child theme for most of our themes so you can easily install them, but what if you missed this step, or you need to handle a certain case where you have to create a child theme after having already set up your parent one. WordPress will identify your child theme as a new theme, so you will need to redo all your Customizer changes. This is a time-consuming procedure you can avoid using the Customizer Import Export plugin
Using this plugin you can easily migrate your Customizer Settings from one installation to another, and not only from a parent to a child theme. This is quite convenient because you can quickly make a change to your staging or local installation and then import it to your production site!
Installing the plugin
You can install the Customizer Export/Import plugin either via the WordPress plugin repository Plugins > Add New, or by uploading the plugin manually your /plugins/ folder.
After installing the plugin, activate it and you will automatically get a new Section on your Customizer (Appearance > Customize) Where you can start importing /exporting your settings.
You can check this article on installing plugins.
Importing and Exporting your settings.
Navigate to Themes > Customize page on the website you want to export from and locate the “Export/Import” panel. Then click on the export button
This action will only work for your Customizer settings and not for menus, and content. Notice you will get a .dat file which you will need to keep and import it in the theme you need the settings to be transferred. So in that theme (you must have the Import/Export Plugin installed) navigate to Customize > Export/Import and
- Select your newly exported .dat extension file
- Check if you need to import any image files (logo for example)
- Start the importing
Once it is finished, you can check if everything imported fine and click on the Customizer’s Publish button to make those changes live.