Easy-Peasy Child Theme Setup

You should always convert your new WordPress site - using ANY theme- into a Child Theme before further customizing or doing ANYTHING to your site.

Particularly if you don’t want all of your hard work to disappear without a trace one day when you receive an unexpected update from WordPress, I HIGHLY recommend that you first convert your site into a Child Theme.

Here are the Lesson Topics we will be covering in this tutorial:

Introduction: What is a Child Theme? (Page 1)

Your Quick Setup: Preliminary Updates (Page 1, Images 1-5)

Lesson 1: Installing the Child Theme Configurator Plugin(Page 2, Images 6-9)

Lesson 2: Analyze and Name Child Theme (Page 3, Images 10-14)

Lesson 3: Copy Parent and Create Child Theme (Page 4, Images 15-16)

Lesson 4: Preview, Activate, and Publish Child Theme (Page 5, Images 17-18)

Lesson 5: Review and Deactivate Child Theme (Page 6, Images 19-20)

What is a Child Theme?

A child theme is an exact copy of your parent theme site. In other words, if you set the child theme up without adding any code, the site with the child theme would be EXACTLY the same as the parent theme.

The main advantage of a child theme is that the code is separate from the parent theme, which means that the parent theme can be updated at any time without losing any changes that you've made.

Thus a child theme inherits all the attributes and functions of the parent theme, while protecting all of your customizations from being overwritten when the parent theme is updated. You can continue to update the parent theme as updates are released safe in the knowledge that your child theme will remain unchanged by the updates.

Your Quick Setup: Preliminary Updates (Optional)

*Note: ONLY complete Steps 1-5 if your WordPress version and Theme is NOT up-to-date. Steps 1-5 can also be completed at the END of this tutorial.

Today we will create an “Easy-Peasy” child theme setup using the plugin Child theme Configurator.

I will be using my own test site kajukajukaju.siterubix.com to conduct this demonstration.

1. Login to your website in your WordPress Dashboard

(I assume you know how!)

2. Go to Appearance > Themes. Click Top Please update now to update to your dashboard to the latest version of WordPress. In this case it’s the current WordPress 4.9.6.

3. Click Update Now in your Theme box (i.e. i-Design) to update the Parent theme

4. Your Parent theme is now updated

5. As you can see in your Theme page, your Child Theme is now active as denoted by Active: i-Design

Now we move on to the “meat” of this tutorial, where we will be installing the Child Theme Configurator, here is what you will need to do.

When you are ready, click “Next Page” to Lesson 1