How to add a Child Theme

A WordPress child theme is a theme that inherits the functionality of another theme, called the parent theme, and allows you to modify, or add to, the functionality of that parent theme. This page shows you how to create a basic child theme and explains what you can do with it.

Making a child theme is very simple. Create a directory, put a properly formatted style.css file in it, and you have a child theme!

With a little understanding of HTML and CSS, you can make a very basic child theme, by modifying the style and layout of a parent theme to any extent without editing the files of the parent theme itself. That way, when the parent theme is updated, your theme modifications will not be overwritten by the WordPress update process.

For this reason, child themes are the most highly recommended method for making modifications to a theme.