1. Power to easily customize : Creating a child theme will give you a power to easily customize your blog to your need without touching the parent theme. You can just want to make changes to design in style.css, and maybe some small changes like menus or footer in functions.php. It will also speed up the time it takes to develop your WordPress blog or site. It’s very easy to set up child theme. You can either use WordPress plugin or manually create child theme. You can just want to make changes to design in style.css, and maybe some small changes like menus or footer in functions.php.
2. Make your own version of a theme : Lots of new theme now a days provide you option to add custom CSS within the parent theme. The downside of adding CSS or any customization on parent theme is that when you update a WordPress theme, any changes or customization you have made to your website will be lost unless you backed-up. Creating a WordPress child theme prevents that from happening. You can customize the child theme, and then update the parent theme. All the updates and new features will automatically be applied to the child theme, but none of the customization will be affected.
3. Available as the fallback option : when you are working on a child theme and forgot to code something, then there is always the parent theme’s functionality available as the fallback option because Child theme is an extension of parent theme. You can use a child theme for extending already created functions or adding new ones. Therefore, when the child theme is activated, every theme functionality stays the same and you should be able to keep on working as before.
What order do things happen, in child/parent theme?
Style: style.css *overrides* the parent.
You have to explicitly load the parent css if you want it.
Functions: functions.php is loaded *in addition to* and *before* the parent’s functions.php
Templates: A child theme can *override* any parental template by:
– using a file with the same name
– or adding a more specific file.
