Child themes are useful for adding your own code snippets to a theme and keeping them safe from theme updates. They are recommended for the more advanced WordPress user.
A child theme lets you modify a parent theme as much (or as little) as you want.
Here’s how you install a child theme:
Step 1 － If you downloaded and extracted your theme from ThemeForest as explained in WordPress Install, you’ll find the child theme in there.
Note that the child theme name might differ from the one pictured
Step 2 － Log into your WordPress dashboard and navigate to Appearance > Themes > Add New. Upload the theme-child.zip file.
With our themes, you’ll get a blank child theme.
It’s very important to note that a parent theme is required, since without the parent theme the child theme will not work.
Here’s what you can do in case you got error message saying that your parent theme is missing:
- Make sure your parent theme is complete, and check the exact spelling of the theme name in style.css. It is case sensitive, so uppercase and lowercase characters are something you should be mindful of.
- Make sure that the child theme directory is named parentname-child. It should be located in the theme directory, and not in a subdirectory of the parent theme.
- Make sure that the child theme style.css has the line Template: parentname in its header; mind you, not the Template: parentname-child.