You have a custom theme or plugin but would like to make further changes. These changes could be from someone on your own staff or by a third party (installing a custom plugin or similar). There are many possible reasons for wanting to customize your site’s theme or plugins however issues can arise when doing so.
North Star Marketing will not be responsible for testing and/or supporting any code implemented by the client and/or any third parties. We strongly recommend that your internal(staff) and third-party developers interacting with the site’s code be thorough in documenting any changes made. North Star actually follows a set methodology when it comes to how we work on sites. This would include GitHub branching, pull requests, and more when it comes to how files are edited in production, staging, and development environments. We would encourage continued use of these methodologies by anyone working on the site who directly alters your custom theme.
Third-Parties:
Changes by Third-Parties requires the signing of a waiver. *This only applies when core WordPress, Theme, or Plugin files are being modified.
Themes:
Editing Theme Files – Changes to theme files can affect the site aesthetics and even functionality – For example, if someone were to use the theme editor and the wrong snippet of code were removed, the site could possibly break or not, it all depends on what was edited. North Star Marketing (NSM) will not be held responsible for any programming complications that arise, directly or indirectly, resulting from adding, editing or deleting code by using the theme editor.
Editing Primary Pages – Changes to primary pages can be made using Gutenberg to place “Blocks” and layout your page! Some of our themes come with more custom blocks than others depending on the initial theme selected, and we also utilize additional block libraries, designs, and templates to provide a well rounded offering of customization capabilities! We do encourage you contact us, before making edits to primary pages and we can run a full backup of the site, if an edit doesn’t go as planned we can either use the revisions feature or restore a backup to recover the page and data!
Plugins:
Plugins are a great feature of WordPress but they can also be a hindrance to the security and speed of your website. We highly recommend checking with us before installing or removing any plugins as some plugins can duplicate functionality that is already a part of our hosting environment, your theme, or they have known security and site speed issues. If a plugin is deemed a security risk, it will be removed automatically and possibly without notification.
Page Builders and Third-Party Customization Plugins:
There are ways to customize a theme that do not require direct editing or knowledge of coding for that matter, and these methods can also modify aspects of your site outside of the normal content editing with the Gutenberg editor. There are page builders and theme editing plugins such as Elementor, WP Bakery Page Builder, WP Stackable Blocks, and other plugins that you may utilize to customize your site.