Here is some quick information about child themes. If you’ve started doing research about building your site with WordPress you have probably read something about child themes. There are a lot of posts out there that say that you must have a child theme before you start building your website. I’m going to talk about why you probably don’t actually need a child theme.
It’s my mission to help you find the best and easiest ways to build a high quality website. I focus on helping you find tools and techniques that allow you to build amazing websites all without having to know how to code.
This website and my online courses are all about helping you reach a out and connect with your customers, your audience and followers by building a great website. And If you are trying to build a customer base audience or following you probably don’t also have the time to teach yourself how to write code just to build your website.
When you do need a child theme
And that brings us to the child theme. The entire purpose of a child theme is to add and modify the code of a WordPress theme. Many basic WordPress themes, and WordPress frameworks require you to use code to make even simple modifications. For example changing the background color of your website.
The problem with just modifying the theme code directly is when there is an update to the theme the update will write over any of the code changes that you made. You get around this problem by creating a child theme.
What a child theme does is to give you a place to make coding modifications to the main theme. A child theme points to all of the code in the main theme or parent theme except for the code that you want to modify. That code is written into the child theme. Updates to the parent theme will not effect the code that you have written into the child theme.
So if you’re comfortable with code, and want to make direct coding changes to your theme, you can do that. Just be sure to make a child theme first.
When you don’t need a child theme
But if your like me and you just want to build a website quickly easily you should be looking for a page builder theme. A page builder theme gives you all sorts of controls over the look of your website. Most page builder themes allow you to easily change the colors of your site. You can also easily make modifications to the header and even change fonts.
Page builder themes have the tools you need to make modifications to the look of your site built right in. With a Page Builder theme you aren’t actually modifying the code of the theme. So when a page builder theme get’s updated, you don’t have to worry about losing your styling modifications. All of those changes are stored inside of your sites database and not in the theme files or theme code.
I hope you found this helpful. If you are looking for a great theme to build your next website check out my top recommended WordPress Themes. If you need help building your website look for my easy to follow online courses on how to build your next website.
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