Even though you have the best theme out there, there can always be a need to add or change the theme’s content. It doesn’t matter if you need a design change or even change the logic content displaying itself, you can change the theme to your desired need. Now, we do know that we can change a theme to our need but the main thing to know is that we should always use a child theme for it.
What Is A Child Theme?
To use a child theme there must always be a theme you want to customize since child theme is a theme which inherits its parent themes functionality and adds its own to it.There are two main files that a child theme must always have which you have to keep in the child theme directory, functions.php and style.cssA simple example of a child theme is shown using Resortica Pro theme.
The CSS added in the child theme’s style.css will change the parent theme’s style.This is a simple example of using a child theme.A detailed way of using child theme can be viewed in Child Themes
Why Should We Use Child Theme?
Now if you are wondering why we can’t just change whatever we need in the theme itself, changing the theme without using child theme would be the biggest mistake you could make.If you change the theme and someone updates the theme in the future all the changes would disappear.Using child theme would prevent the changes from disappearing as only the parent theme would be updated and not the child theme.The main advantages of child themes are:
- The main reason is undoubtedly the fact that any customization done to the theme remains intact even after theme update.
- Child theme decreases the time rate to work on a theme as we do not need to create a theme from scratch.
- You can always deactivate the child theme if you just want the theme to be as it originally was.
Conclusion:
Child themes are a must if you want to change the theme itself.It minimizes the production cost as well as development time to build a theme.Hopefully, this tutorial gives you an understanding of child themes and why you should use it while customizing a theme.
