How to Create a Child Theme in WordPress

If you’re not familiar with the basics of creating a website using the popular WordPress platform, you may be wondering what a child theme is and why it’s important for your website. A child theme is basically a duplicate of your main theme that allows you to make changes without affecting the original design. In this blog post, we will discuss why you should create a child theme and how to do it.

Why Create a Child Theme?

Creating a child theme will help protect your existing design from any potential errors or changes made while editing the code. It also allows you to update the main theme without erasing any customizations that have been done to the design. It’s also great for testing out different designs or features before committing them to your live website.

So, now that we know why it’s important, let’s go over how to create one in WordPress.

First Step: Download Your Main Theme

The first step is to locate and download your main theme file. You can do this by going into the Appearances tab in WordPress and clicking on Themes. From there, you will be able to locate and download the zip file of your main theme. Once this has been downloaded, unzip it on your computer so that you can access all of its files and folders.

Second Step: Create New Folder

Once your main theme has been downloaded, open up the folder containing all of its files and folders and then create another folder inside of it called “Child-Theme” (or whatever else you want). This is where all of your customizations will be saved so make sure that it is easy to find and reference later on when needed. Third Step: Create Stylesheet File Now that you have created a new folder, open up any text editor program (such as Notepad++) on your computer and create a new file called “style.css” (again, name it whatever works best for you). This file should contain some basic information about what type of CSS coding language is being used (usually either SASS or LESS) as well as some minor details about which version of WordPress or other platform is being used (if applicable). Fourth Step: Add Customizations Now comes the fun part! Inside style.css, add any customizations that you would like for your child theme such as changing colors, fonts, images, etc… Make sure to save all changes after each customization so that they are applied correctly when previewing the page later on. Once all desired changes have been made, move onto step five! Fifth Step: Test Out Your Design Before making any major changes or applying them directly onto live versions of websites or pages, always test out these customizations using either an internal version control system or by simply previewing them on localhost environments first! This way any potential errors can be caught early on before they become too difficult to fix down the line!

Conclusion

Creating a child theme can help protect your existing design from any potential errors or changes made while editing code in WordPress—plus provide an excellent testing ground for ideas before they go live! If followed correctly, these steps should ensure success when creating one! With proper planning beforehand plus double checking afterwards—you’ll soon have yourself fully functioning child themes working their magic behind-the-scenes at no extra cost beyond time invested into doing necessary research upfront! Good luck!