What Is a WordPress Child Theme?

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A WordPress child theme is not a standalone theme. It’s a “child” of an existing parent theme, hence the name, Nextland Multi-Purpose Theme.

You’ll install it alongside your parent theme, but it gives you a chance to safely make changes to your parent theme without needing to edit the parent theme itself.

The child theme will pull most/all of its design settings from the parent theme. However, in situations where you make a change to the child theme, that change will override the settings in the parent theme.

Advantages of a Child Theme

At this point, you might be wondering why you can’t just make your changes directly to the parent theme?

The main reason why that isn’t a good idea is theme updates.

If you want to keep your WordPress site secure and well-functioning, you need to promptly apply updates as they come out, including updates to your theme.

When to Use a Child Theme

Other than a few exceptions that we’ll list below, you should always use a child theme if you’re planning to make your own edits to an existing WordPress theme.

When You Don’t Need to Use a Child Theme

In general, using a child theme is a good best practice whenever you’re customizing your WordPress theme.

However, there are some exceptions to the rule where there might be a better option than using a child theme.

First, if you just want to make a few minor CSS modifications, it might be overkill to create a child theme just for a few tweaks.

Instead, you can add your custom CSS using the built-in Additional CSS feature in the WordPress Customizer. Or, you can use a free plugin such as Tom Usborne’s Simple CSS plugin.

Second, if you’re making changes that you want to be theme-independent, a child theme might not be the best option.

For example, if you’re registering a custom taxonomy or custom post type, you probably don’t want to use your child theme’s functions.php file (because you’d want to keep those even if you switch themes). Instead, you should just add the code outside of your theme entirely with a plugin such as Code Snippets or your own custom plugin.

Start Creating a Child Theme

To create a child theme, you should be aware that you will be working with code. You’ll need a basic understanding of HTML and CSS to understand what changes you need to make to the code to achieve your goals.

Some knowledge of PHP is also helpful. You should at least be familiar with copying and pasting code snippets from other sources.

We recommend you practice in your local development environment. You can move a live WordPress site to a local server for testing purposes or use dummy content for theme development.

Finally, you need to decide on a parent theme. You should choose a parent theme that’s similar in appearance and features to your end goal. The aim is to make a few changes as possible.

In this article, we’ll use the Twenty Twenty-One theme, which is one of the default WordPress themes.

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