Verba basic settings: the Customizer panels

Everything the free theme configures lives in one place: AppearanceCustomize. There is no second settings screen to hunt for.

A site set up entirely from the Customizer is a finished site, not a preview of a better one. The Pro plugin adds another layer on top, and that layer is optional.

#How the Customizer behaves

Changes show up in the preview on the right as you make them, and nothing reaches your visitors until you press Publish. That is the point of the Customizer: you see the result before anyone else does.

If you close the panel without publishing, your changes are discarded. WordPress will warn you first.

#The panels

General: Site-wide behavior: page layout (normal or boxed), branding and logos, the dark scheme, breadcrumbs, the scroll-to-top button, reveal animations, and your social profiles.
Theme Styles: How the site looks. Fonts, text sizes and weights, headings, buttons, labels, forms, the light and dark color pairs, container widths, and corner radius. The style kit presets live here too.
Navigation: The header. Layout, header branding, the call to action, menus, mobile behavior, search, the category row, and the posts ticker.
Footer: The footer, its branding, its widget columns, and its ticker.
Single Post: The article page. General options, the sidebar, the post header and footer, and navigation between posts.
Archive: Category, tag, author, date, and search pages. Layout, sidebar, card style, page header, featured post, author pages, and the search results page.
Posts Page: The blog listing, for when your front page is a static page and posts live on their own page.
Pages: Ordinary pages: their header, content zones, and call to action.
404 Error Page: The not-found page: illustration, texts, buttons, and quick links.

#Style kits

A style kit sets the whole look in one click: fonts, headings, colors for both schemes, and the rest of the Theme Styles values. Find them under AppearanceCustomizeTheme StylesGeneral.

Layout values are deliberately left out of the kits, so switching a kit does not change your container widths underneath you.

Start from the kit closest to what you want, then adjust. It is much faster than setting thirty values by hand, and you can still change every one of them afterwards.

The theme registers four widget areas, and they use the block editor rather than classic widgets.

Footer Columns: widgets arranged in columns above the footer meta row.
Footer Full Width: widgets shown full width below those columns.
Archive Sidebar: shown alongside category, tag, author, date, and search listings.
Single Post Sidebar: shown alongside the article, when the single post sidebar is turned on.

You fill them at AppearanceWidgets. You turn them on and set their behavior in the Customizer, on the Sidebar tab inside the matching panel: the archive sidebar under Archive, the post sidebar under Single Post. Narrow-screen behavior and what happens while scrolling live on the same tab.

Turning a sidebar on for one specific page is a per-page setting instead. See Pages.

#Where the free layer ends

The Customizer and Theme Options are two separate stores. Theme Options is not an expanded Customizer and it does not override it. It configures what Pro adds.

That has an awkward consequence worth stating plainly: the same setting name in both places is not the same setting. Content width in the Customizer and content width in Theme Options apply to different things, and changing one does not move the other.

What the free layer does not do: custom post listings with your own rules, content insertion zones, object fields on categories and authors, and Elementor templates. Those come from Pro. The full comparison is in Verba editions.

#When a change does not show up

I changed a setting and the site looks the same

Two usual causes.

Caching. A page cache, a CDN, or an optimization plugin can keep serving the old page. Clear the cache and reload with a hard refresh.

A local override. A value set on one specific post or page beats the site-wide value. That is intentional: the narrower setting wins, so one article can differ without changing the rest of the site. Open that post and check its own options.

Can I use both the Customizer and Theme Options?

Yes, and with Pro installed you will. The Customizer keeps the basics, Theme Options carries everything Pro adds. Just do not expect a value in one to change the other.

Where do I get more settings than this?

The Pro plugin adds the Theme Options panel and the object fields. Verba editions lays out what is in each.

Last updated 9 Sep 2026

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Basic settings in the Customizer