The Tools page in the theme dashboard carries the operations that act on the whole configuration rather than on one setting. Exporting and importing settings is the one people come for.
#What an export contains
Your theme settings: colors, typography, layout choices, the options you have tuned. It is a file describing configuration.
It does not contain your content. Posts, pages, media and menus are not in it and are not affected by importing one.
#Moving a configuration between sites
Export from the configured site
Open the Tools page and export. You get a file to download.
Back up the site you are importing into
An import replaces the settings that are there. That cannot be undone from the panel, so the backup is what makes it reversible.
Import on the target site
Upload the file on that site's Tools page and run the import.
Check the result
Load the front page. If it looks stale, clear any page cache, since the generated CSS is rebuilt on save.
An import replaces the target site's settings rather than merging with them.
Anything tuned there and not present in the file is lost, which is why the backup step is in the middle of the sequence rather than at the end.
#When this is worth doing
Building several sites on the same theme, where one configured site becomes the starting point for the rest. Moving a site from staging to production without redoing the setup by hand. Or keeping a copy of a configuration you spent real time on before experimenting with it.
#Also on this page
- Diagnostics
Runs the environment and connectivity checks and produces the report support asks for. On a free build the tab is visible but locked.
- The child theme generator
Builds a child theme from the current version, so your code edits survive updates. It also handles white labeling.
And one thing that is deliberately not here: Reset Data lives under Preferences, not Tools. It erases settings immediately and irreversibly, which is why it is kept away from the everyday operations.
#Common questions
Can I import settings from a different theme?
No, because the file describes the settings of one theme and another theme has different ones, so there is nothing for most of the values to land on.
Does the export include my fonts?
Fonts added through the theme's font library travel with the settings as a list, while fonts in the WordPress font library belong to WordPress and stay with that site.
Will importing settings change my homepage?
It changes theme settings, and the front page assignment is a WordPress setting in SettingsReading, so it is worth checking both after a move.
Can I edit the export file by hand?
You can open it, and editing it is a reliable way to produce a file that will not import, so change the settings in the panel and export again instead.
An import fails partway
An upload rejected as too large is upload_max_filesize, and an import that starts and then stops is usually max_execution_time, both of which appear on the diagnostics screen and both of which are host settings rather than theme settings.
#Still stuck
Open a support ticket with the file size and the message the import screen showed.
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