What is a child theme and Why You should be using it?

What is a WordPress Child theme?

A WordPress child theme is a WordPress theme which inherits the functionalities and styling of the parent WordPress Theme.

Using a child theme is a good practice to modify the parent theme. I always recommend this to all my clients.

Why should you be using a child theme?

1. Users can lose all the changes done in the function or styling of the parent theme files if the parent theme is updated.
2. If any of your changes or modification in the child theme goes wrong, your parent theme is still safe.
3. It will help you to speed up the web development process.
4. It is also a great of learning about WordPress core functionalities.

This is how it looks

The above image is from my WordPress dashboard appearance section.

I have built my website using the Free GeneratePress theme, so my parent theme is “GenratePress“. (Also there is a premium version of GeneratePress  which has many more features and it’s very lightweight)

The leftmost image is the Child-theme and its status is active so this means my it is currently active theme on my website.

There is a Great news!

Setting it up is a one-time effort and then users can add or remove any WordPress code using a child theme because parent theme will remain unaffected.

Users will get the benefits when there is a new update for parent theme, so they don’t have to worry about losing the changes you made to your website.

Most of the people get their website developed without a child-theme as they don’t know about child theme usually

So now when you know about it always do ask your developer to set up a child-theme for you while building a website.

If you want to know how to set up a child theme, we have written another blog for it “Steps to set up a child theme on your WordPress”   click here