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Troubleshooting Common Twenty Twelve Theme Issues: Page Titles, Layout, and Styling

20 threads Sep 16, 2025 Theme → Twenty twelve

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The Twenty Twelve theme is a popular and reliable choice for many WordPress users. However, like any theme, users can occasionally encounter issues. Based on community discussions, here are some of the most common problems and their solutions.

1. Page Title Formatting Issues

Problem: The page title and site name appear concatenated without a separator (e.g., "AboutBlogTitle") instead of being formatted correctly (e.g., "About | Blog Title"). This is often mistaken for a problem with an SEO plugin.

Solution: This behavior is typically controlled by the active theme and any SEO plugins you have installed. Since this works correctly in other default themes like Twenty Eleven, the issue is likely a conflict specific to how Twenty Twelve interacts with your SEO plugin's title formatting settings. Review your SEO plugin's documentation for guidance on customizing title formats to ensure compatibility with Twenty Twelve.

2. Layout Changes After an Update

Problem: The site's layout changes unexpectedly after updating the Twenty Twelve theme.

Solution: Major updates to themes can sometimes modify CSS styles or template files. If you have made direct customizations to the theme's files, an update will overwrite them, causing the layout to revert or break. The recommended way to prevent this is to use a child theme for all customizations. This ensures your changes remain safe during parent theme updates. If your layout has changed, you will need to re-implement your custom CSS or PHP modifications within a child theme.

3. Adjusting Spacing and Margins

Problem: Users often want to remove excess space above the header, below the footer, or adjust the spacing within widgets.

Solution: These visual adjustments are best handled with custom CSS. You can add the following code to your theme's "Additional CSS" section (found under Appearance > Customize) or in a custom CSS plugin:

/* Remove space above header and below footer */
body .site {
    margin-top: 0;
    margin-bottom: 0;
}

/* Decrease space between widget title and content */
.widget-area .widget h3 {
    margin-bottom: 0.5rem;
}

4. Featured Image Appearing Twice

Problem: A featured image appears twice on a page or post.

Solution: This is almost always caused by user error during post creation, not a bug in the theme. If you set a featured image and also insert the same image into the post content manually, it will appear twice. The solution is to choose one method or the other. To display the featured image automatically, use the "Set featured image" option but do not also insert that same image into the post body.

5. Post Titles Not Showing

Problem: The titles of posts are not visible.

Solution: First, check the Post Format for the affected posts. The Twenty Twelve theme is designed to hide the title for certain post formats (like the "Image" format). Ensure your posts are using the "Standard" post format if you want the title to be displayed by default.

For more persistent issues, especially those that might be caused by a conflict with another plugin, standard troubleshooting steps are recommended: disable all plugins to see if the problem resolves, then re-enable them one by one to identify the culprit.

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