Child Theme Importance in WordPress

In this article, we will discuss “Child Theme Importance in WordPress”. First, we need to know, what is a Child theme? A child theme is a theme that inherits the functionality and styling of another theme, called the parent theme. A child theme is used to modify existing themes while still maintaining their design and code. Mostly, child themes used when we want to customize the existing theme without losing the ability to upgrade the theme.

Basically, the child theme inherits the code, functionality, and design of the parent theme. We can customize the theme as per requirements. All your customization placed in the child theme directory, so no worries about the parent theme upgrades.

I recommend child theme implementation only if you want to apply any kind of customization. This will reduce your headache, to differentiate your customization from your parent theme.

Advantages of WordPress Child Theme

1. Keep original theme safe: Using the child theme, our parent theme is safe and untouched. This means we can reinstall it any time if any case of damage
2. Faster development: Child theme provides a platform to make development faster. No need to write code from scratch, this will make our development cost-effective and faster.
3. Easy to customize: We can easily apply customization for the parent theme, as per the available hooks and filter of the parent theme.

Disadvantages of WordPress Child Theme

1. Required knowledge of parent theme: Using of child theme requires proper knowledge of parent theme and its functionality. Not all the developers are the same, which means you have to know the theme and its file behavior.
2. The parent theme is Abandoned: Sometimes theme-creators abandon the projects due to the theme sales. This means no longer receive any update for your theme. So do proper research to pick up a good parent theme. Also, you can check the review of existing users before buying any theme.

How to Create a WordPress Child Theme

It’s a simple and easy process to create a WordPress Child Theme. Please check the following steps:

Create theme directory

First, you need to open /wp-content/themes in your WordPress installations directory. Hers’s create a folder for your child’s theme. I create a child theme for wp default theme “twentytwentyone”, So my child theme directory name is “twentytwentyone-child”.

Create a stylesheet

Here, we have to create a stylesheet in our child theme directory with the name of style.css. And, add the following header in this file. This is required for the child theme, basically, here we add the details of our parent theme.

/*
 Theme Name: Twenty Twenty-One
 Theme URI: https://wordpress.org/themes/twentytwentyone/
 Description:  Theme description
 Author:       Code Briefly
 Author URI:   https://codebriefly.com
 Template:     twentytwentyone
 Version:      0.0.1
 License:      Licence details
 License URI:  Licence URL
 Tags:         tags related with your child theme 
 Text Domain:  twentytwentyone
*/

@import url("../twentytwentyone/style.css")

You can get more details on the same here.

In the above stylesheet header, last we import our parent theme stylesheet into the child theme.

Activate the Child Theme

Our child theme is ready, now we have to activate our child theme. So, go to Appearance » Themes where you will see your WordPress Child Theme. You need to click on the activate button.

Everythings ready, Now you can do your customizations as per your requirements.

Conclusion

I hope this article helped you to understand “Child Theme Importance in WordPress”. If you like this article, then please follow us. And, if any query then please feel free to add comments or you can share your feedback 🙂

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