How to create a child theme in WordPress

Hi! In this very short video, I will show you how you can create a child theme in WordPress. Just follow the steps and you will be up and running in just 60 seconds. No coding skills required. So let’s get started. Hi, I am the WordPress Doctor and I’ve been building WordPress websites since 2004. I make these child themes every single week, so I know the best way to do it, quick and easy.

Go to you’re wordpress dashboard. From your dashboard you go to plugins, add new. Then we search plugins ‘child theme configuretor’ and we use this one by Lelia Media. We press ‘install now’ and we press ‘activate’. Now go to ‘Tools’ and ‘Child themes’. Click on ‘analyze’. I’m using Divi but you can choose any theme that you have. We can all leave this information the same. You can change this if you want, it’s the theme directory, your folder name on the server. You can leave it like this here you can change your own child theme attributes. Check this box and press create new child theme. And that’s it! We now we go to ‘Appearence’ and we go to themes, and here you will see that I have a WordPress DoC Child Theme right here. And I press activate and the child theme is live.

We’re going to use this child team to add a awesome effects. The child theme we can customize here with ‘theme editor’. We go to style.css this and I paste here a little code, that was 10 years ago it was so awesome. We just update file and now go to my web site. And look at this beautiful snow falling down! Oh it’s beautiful we have snow everywhere. And that’s the beautiful effect I can create with this child theme it’s so awesome. Now when I update Divi, the snow effect will still be there. So that is great newss great news.

Well done! You have just created a WordPress child theme. I am proud of you! Now wasn’t that easy? Now how to use your child theme. Well if you’re going to add a functionality you will have to edit the functions.php in your child-theme. Why do you place it there? Well. If you have a theme that is designed by other guys and built by other developers, they often tend to update it. If they don’t update it, it will break down because WordPress is a system that’s constantly updating and changing and adding new features and everything is gonna get better, bigger, beautiful, more smarter and faster for us. So thats really awesome. That people have to change their WordPress, update their WordPress, of the themes has to update also. But if you change anmd update your theme, your functionality is added in that theme will be lost, will be gone. So that’s why you need a child theme where you can add the functionalitys, little code snippets into your functions.php file in your child theme and that works awesome. So let’s say you have a WooCommerce web site. You are selling products but maybe you sell one product and after people added to their basket you don’t want the people to go to the basket, you want people to go to the checkout, immediately. That’s possible with a code snippet. You copy and paste that code snippet inside your functions.php of your child-theme and it is safe there. It works like a charm. WordPress loads the functions.php before it loads your functions.php from your main theme so your functions will be overridden by your child theme. And that works really awesome. You can add anything you would like. If you would like to change the e-mail sent out by WooCommercel for example to customers. You copy those original emails from the WooCommerce plugin into your child-themeg and that is the place where you can change them and edit them to make them more beautiful to fit your needs. It is all possible with your child theme.

If I helped you out in this little small video please, hit that like button and if you want to know more of my videos you can just hit that subscribe button also. So you will get notified when there’s a new video. Hey the sky’s the limit. You can do it. Go make me proud and show the world what you have to offer with your WordPress Web site. Have a awesome day!

Because life is more than just adding child themes to your WordPress installation. I have another quote for you. The quote of today is: “Between the inspiration of a dream and the manifestation, there is a lot of transpiration.” Just go for your dreams, but it will take hard work. Just don’t quit. Don’t give up. Build your website, build out your dream and go show the world what you have to offer. But remember it’s gonna cost you a lot of transpiration. In those moments, don’t give up. Have a awesome day. Good luck!