How to migrate Customizer settings to a child theme

I’m sure you know the feeling – you’ve found a WordPress theme you love and spent hours tweaking the Customizer settings to get your site looking just the way you want it only to realise you should have created a child theme first. Creating a child theme at this point would mean losing all of your hard work and having to redo all of your Customizer setting changes to the child theme. There is a very simple solution though – the Customizer Export/Import plugin. This handy plugin lets you export the Customizer settings from one theme and import them into another.

Exporting Customizer Settings

1. Navigate to Appearance > Customize > Export/Import
2. Click the Export button. This will download a .dat file to your computer

Importing Customizer Settings

1. Navigate to Appearance > Themes and activate the child theme into which you wish to import the Customizer settings
2. Navigate to Appearance > Customize > Export/Import
3. Click the Choose File button, select the .dat file you downloaded and then click Import

Of course this method isn’t only limited to child themes. If you’re using the same theme on two different sites and want to quickly recreate the same look on one of them this method will make doing that a cinch.