This video tutorial goes over how to create a WordPress child theme so you can customize your parent theme markup and styles.
If you purchased a premium WordPress theme or just want to make some changes to a theme that you found on the web, it is important to create a child theme. Creating a child theme will make sure that the changes you make to the theme will not be overwritten when the parent theme rolls out a new update.
There are only a few instances where I can see that you don’t need a child theme when customizing a theme:
- You don’t care about future updates for the theme you are using..
- You are building a custom WordPress theme from scratch. Your own parent theme.
- You can make all your needed changes in the parent theme options panel.
Other than those few instances, I would recommend creating a child theme to make all the needed changes you would like to your parent theme.
Steps to Create a WordPress Child Theme
The following steps go over how to create a child theme for the Twenty Seventeen WordPress theme, but they can be followed to make a child theme for any child theme friendly parent WordPress theme.
- In the
/themes/directory create a new directory for your child theme files. In this casetwentyseventeen-child - In this new directory create two new files,
styles.cssandfunctions.phpwith the code below: - Go to the WordPress Dashboard then Appearance -> Themes and activate your new child theme
Now that you have a child theme, you can start make any changes that you would like to the parent theme.
