Hestia Theme to Next.js: Getting Your Front Page Out of the Customizer

The trap: a homepage made of settings

Hestia is a one-page theme with a Material Kit look, and its front page is assembled from sections you switch on, reorder and fill in from the Customizer. It feels like editing a page. It is not. Each section's title, subtitle and items are saved as theme settings, called theme mods, in a single database entry that belongs to the theme. The sections with repeating items, like features or team members, store the whole list as one string of JSON inside that entry.

That design causes three surprises when you leave. Export your pages and the sections are missing. Switch to a child theme or another theme and the sections are gone from the screen, though the settings still sit in the database. And if you never edited a section, its text may not be stored anywhere at all: the theme shows its own default wording from code, so the live site shows text that no export will ever find.

About is the odd one out. Hestia fills it with the content of the page set as your static front page, so it travels with an ordinary export. Everything else on that table needs to be read from the theme settings directly.

Orbit Fox, the plugin holding up half the page

When the free Hestia theme is active without it, the Customizer shows a notice suggesting you install Orbit Fox Companion to take full advantage of the theme. Most owners clicked yes years ago and forgot. Inside that plugin is a legacy module that adds the Features, Team, Testimonials, Ribbon and Clients Bar sections to free Hestia. Deactivate it and those sections disappear from the front page.

Orbit Fox has since grown into a general utility bundle, with 100,000+ active installs on wordpress.org. Its modules include menu icons, duplicate page, a cookie notice, custom fonts, social sharing buttons, a login page customizer and a header and footer scripts box. That last one matters during a migration. If your analytics or ad tracking codes were pasted there, they are not in the theme and not in a tracking plugin, and they have to be carried over on purpose.

What Hestia Pro was paying for

Hestia Pro, as of October 2026, sells Personal at $69 for the first year (regular $139) for one site, Business at $129 (regular $259) for three sites with premium starter sites and Sparks for WooCommerce, and Agency at $249 (regular $499) for unlimited sites, Otter Pro and white label. Themeisle offers a 30-day refund. We could not confirm renewal prices, so check your account before your next renewal date.

For a migration, the license matters because of what it switched on. The Pro sections, Portfolio and Pricing, carry their own content: Portfolio reads Jetpack portfolio items, which have their own URLs, and Pricing stores each table's title, price, features and button in theme settings. A Big Title slider in Pro means several slides to move rather than one. The Pro hooks page and custom layouts may hold code or content injected into the theme's hooks, the same way a header script box does. And on Business or Agency, Sparks for WooCommerce adds quick view, wishlists, swatches and comparison tables that a store will want replaced.

After launch, none of this needs renewing. If Pro is still active, keep it until the new site goes live, because we compare the two side by side while building.

Seven steps to lift Hestia's sections into Next.js

1. 1

   Copy the settings, not just the pages

   Back up the full database and uploads, then export the theme's settings entry (theme_mods_hestia, or the child theme's equivalent) so every section's content is on file even if a plugin is switched off later.

2. 2

   Screenshot the live front page

   Capture it at desktop, tablet and phone widths with every section open. Default text the theme prints from code only exists here, so the screenshots are the record.

3. 3

   List sections, order and visibility

   Note which sections are on, which are hidden, and their order. Hidden sections often still hold content you may want back.

4. 4

   Inventory the helpers

   Record active Orbit Fox modules, Jetpack features, the form plugin behind the Contact and Subscribe sections, WooCommerce and Sparks.

5. 5

   Model each section as fields

   Turn Features, Team, Testimonials, Pricing and the rest into content types with named fields: icon, title, text, link, photo, role. Fill them from the exported JSON.

6. 6

   Rebuild the design without the baggage

   Recreate the Material look in Next.js components. The Roboto and Roboto Slab defaults load through next/font; Bootstrap, jQuery, Font Awesome and the parallax script stay behind.

7. 7

   Move posts, map URLs, launch

   Export posts and inner pages, rebuild any builder pages from their content, write redirects for every changed address, move DNS and watch Search Console.

The third option

Athena CMS, with AI agents on staff.

Not a theme and not a blank Next.js repo. The content system we put behind every custom site: plain fields, a real preview, every version kept, and AI agents that handle the chores a plugin only nags you about.

• PPicassoImages
• AApolloSite analysis
• AAresCompetitor watch
• PPrometheusContent holes
• AAtlasPage depth and structure
• DDelphiAI search visibility

ZDAOAand 12 more agents. Two come with Athena; the rest are monthly add-ons.

Meet the agentsTake the Athena tour

PPicassoWeekly · ImagesAApolloWeekly · Site analysis

Anchor links, inner pages and the redirect plan

One-page sites have a quirk that helps. Hestia gives its sections IDs such as #about, #features and #team, and the menu on many Hestia sites links to those anchors. Anchors never reach the server, so they need no redirects; we simply keep the same IDs on the new home page so old bookmarks and shared links still scroll to the right place.

The real URL work is everywhere else: blog posts, inner pages, Jetpack portfolio items, WooCommerce products and category archives. We crawl them all, keep each address where possible and write a permanent redirect for each one that changes, following our redirect guide and the patterns in WordPress URL structure in Next.js.

There is also an opportunity here. A single scrolling page can rank for your name and one core service. It struggles to rank for each service on its own. Many Hestia owners use the migration to give each feature card its own page, with the home page section linking to them. New pages add search reach without disturbing the old URLs. Migrating without losing SEO covers how to do that safely, and moving a WordPress blog covers the posts.

Hestia stored your homepage in a drawer marked theme settings, and every migration starts by opening it.

Parallax layers, team photos and logos

Hestia's images are scattered. The Big Title can use a background image or two parallax layers. The About section has its own background. Team photos, testimonial portraits and client logos sit inside the JSON lists, referenced by address rather than attached to any page. Some may have been uploaded so long ago that they are three times the size a phone needs.

We collect images from the theme settings as well as the media library, so nothing referenced only from a section gets lost. Then next/image serves each one at the right size and in a modern format, and every image gets a written description. The heavy parallax effect is replaced with a static image or a light CSS effect, which also removes a common source of layout shift. Moving WordPress images to Next.js explains the full process. If your current site feels slow on phones, our Hestia speed page shows which parts of the theme's asset stack are responsible.

From Customizer panels to plain fields

Hestia owners are used to editing sections in a sidebar while the preview updates beside them. Athena CMS keeps that habit and drops the fragility. Each section becomes a set of plain fields: a team member is a photo, a name, a role and a bio. A real preview shows the result before it goes live, and every version is kept, so last month's testimonials are one click away.

Agents take the chores. Atlas checks page depth and flags orphan and thin pages, which matters once a one-pager grows into a dozen pages. Prometheus finds questions customers ask that the site does not answer and drafts pages for approval. Iris writes search titles, descriptions and social cards. Picasso keeps images described and sized. Argus watches forms and links. The details of the move are at switching from WordPress, and the full comparison is at Athena vs WordPress.

When a Hestia site is better left alone

Themeisle still updates Hestia often: 3.3.4 through 3.3.7 all shipped between May and September 2026. If your site is a single page that rarely changes, works on phones and brings in what it needs to, a migration buys you little. Fix what bothers you instead. Hestia mobile menu not working, Hestia header not showing and Hestia CSS not updating cover the common problems, and our theme troubleshooting team can take it from there.

Move when the one page has to become many, when leads matter more than looks, or when you are tired of a stack built on Bootstrap and jQuery. Hestia vs Next.js sets out the choice row by row. What a migration costs and how long it takes explain the quote, and our WordPress to Next.js development service does the build. For other themes, start at WordPress to Next.js.