Are you looking to create a child theme in WordPress?

Once you learn the WordPress basics, you probably want to learn how to customize your WordPress site. Child themes are a great starting point for anyone looking to customize WordPress themes.

In this article, we will show you how to create a child theme in WordPress.

Why Do You Need a Child Theme?

A child theme is a WordPress theme that inherits the functionality, features, and style of another WordPress theme, which is the parent theme. You can then customize the child theme without making any changes to the parent theme.

Child themes are the best way to customize a WordPress theme because they save time and effort. The parent theme already contains lots of formatting and functionality, so you don’t have to code everything from scratch.

They also make it safe to update your WordPress themes. Because you modified the child theme and not the parent, you won’t lose any customization when you update the parent theme.

Once you’re happy with your child theme, you can even use it on another WordPress site.

Before You 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 as few changes as possible.

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

Creating Your First Child Theme

You can create a child theme manually by creating the folder and files that are needed. Or you can create one using a child theme plugin.

The manual method is helpful because it will help you become familiar with the files you need to work with later in the tutorial. The plugin method can be used if you have difficulties creating those files.

You only need to use one method, and you can jump to the method you prefer using the links below:

• Method 1: Creating a Child Theme Using Code
• Method 2: Creating a Child Theme Using a Plugin

Method 1: Creating a Child Theme Using Code

First, you need to open /wp-content/themes/ in your WordPress installation folder and create a new folder for your child theme.

You can name this folder anything you want. For this tutorial, we will be naming it wpbdemo.