Customizing a WordPress Theme Without Touching Any Code

In the Customizer, colors and typography usually live under sections named Colors, Typography, or within a broader Global Styles panel depending on the theme. You'll typically find a primary color picker, background color, and link color as a minimum, with more thorough themes exposing separate controls for headings versus body text fonts, font size, and line spacing.

In the Site Editor, this same control lives under Styles, with a more unified approach: a single color palette and font pairing apply across the whole site by default, and you can override them per-block where needed. Changing the palette here updates every template using it at once, which is faster than a classic theme's Customizer but means a mistake at the palette level also shows up everywhere immediately — the live preview is what catches that before publishing.

Menu setup lives under Appearance > Menus for both theme types, though block themes may also let you edit a Navigation block directly inside the Site Editor's header template. Either way, the workflow is the same: create a menu, drag pages, posts, or custom links into it in the order you want them to appear, and assign it to a menu location the theme defines (typically 'primary' or 'header').

Themes with multiple menu locations (a header menu plus a footer menu, for example) need each one assigned separately, and it's easy to publish a site with an empty footer menu simply because that second location was never assigned anything. Checking every menu location the theme documentation lists, not just the obvious main navigation, catches this before launch.