How To Create A Child Theme For WordPress – Quick and Easy

thank you so much for watching the press avenue youtube channel my name is john and i like to talk about wordpress tutorials to better help you use wordpress itself today we got a question submitted which is how do i create a child theme and i'm going to walk you through how to do just that our website's press avenue.com and we've been asked quite a few times how people can support us and we signed up for a buy me a coffee um website similar to patreon just a little simpler so if you do want to support us that's one way to do it another way to do it is to give this video a thumbs up if it's helpful and hit the subscribe button if you want to see more wordpress tutorials so i've created a demo site it's got nothing on it i just put it together yesterday or today i should say and it's running locally on my machine the only thing i've installed on here is elementor and under appearance is the stock themes so i'm going to walk you through how to easily create a child theme but first we're going to get a theme that i really like using with elementor and it's the hello theme so i'll go up here and i'll type hello it used to be number one and now there's this hello fashion by someone else but hello elementor is the one i'm going to install and activate so a big reason for installing a child theme is if you add custom css styling into this theme and the theme updates all that code or extras has been wiped away so you might be saying well i don't add styling um maybe you just grab a snippet off a website like ours to change a header or footer or something else again that would be wiped away if you don't have a child theme and the child theme inherits all the styling from the parent theme so then you just add code to manipulate that or change it as needed so i always create a child theme no matter what i'm doing and we'll do it right now so the easiest way to do is go to plugins add new search and we'll go to child theme and this one right here it's kind of like a it's like a moon with it i some people say it looks like a bird or an airplane shooting down but it's the child theme configurator so go ahead and hit install and then we're going to activate it it's got 300 000 um installs which is pretty good i've probably done it quite a few times with it so here we are and to find this we go to tools and then child themes and it gives us a ton of options but first number one what do you want to do i want to create a new child theme and number two select a parent theme so it has all the themes here you can do you know 2021 2020 2019 but we're going to do hello elementor and we're going to click analyze so sometimes this goes fast sometimes it goes slow just depends on the theme itself but if we come down here it says this theme appears okay to use as a child theme and the theme loads additional styles after style.css so typically as a default style.css is where all the styles are for most most themes as you can see this one has theme.min.css which has additional stuff then it says consider saving new custom styles to a step separate style sheet see step five below all right so step four name the new theme so usually i put in the client name or something else here so let's say press avenue child so again this is the folder itself so if you go into ftp um you'll see whatever you name this as a folder with everything in it so step 5 primary style sheet style dot css separate style sheet save new custom styles to a separate style sheet now if you look up here this says consider saving it as a separate style sheet if you don't have a theme that has an additional css file i would do it as the primary if you do i would do it as a separate and then combine any existing child theme styles with the parent to form a baseline select this option if you want to preserve the existing child theme styles instead of overriding them and then lastly this option allows you to customize style sheets that load after the primary which is fine which is what we want all right six parent theme style sheet handling i usually just use the wordpress um way of doing it um import works as well this is not recommended um but i have done it this way as well and then advanced handling options you can ignore the parent theme style sheets which is not a reason why i ever use a child theme so i don't use this one but if you want to strip everything out you can and then by default you can order the style sheets here and then lastly customize the child theme name description etc so i always do this as well so the description call it whatever you want um for clients i sometimes put you know do not remove um and then the author i'll put myself and then the theme website um i would put my website or wherever it is if you don't have a listing of themes i would either do your website or a contact form and i put this in here and then theme description i usually copy the title say do not remove and then if you have any questions please contact put your contact info the tags i leave alone the version again you can leave alone or you can you know say this is 1.0 or 2.0 or whatever and then copy menus widgets and other items i usually don't do this um and then i click create and then it analyzes it and it goes fairly fast and we're done so now if i go over here to appearance i have the press avenue child do not remove things so if i go to activate it's now active and then under theme editor hey heads up i get it if you see here it has ctc separate style sheet and then it says the name that i put in etc so it's all here and then i can add my additional styling here which is really great and then we can see the other style sheet here as well and there's nothing in it because this theme itself is very simple and the last step i do is i come back to plugins i deactivate and i get rid of this because there's no reason to have this plug-in again it really is a tool to get you in get what you need and get out all right so if you have any questions similar to this or a word that are wordpress related go ahead and leave them in the comment section below we have a facebook group facebook.com group press avenue where you can ask questions as well and i might just answer them via video and again go ahead and give this video a thumbs up if it was helpful and subscribe if you want to see more wordpress tutorials like this thank you so much for watching