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WordPress How to Make a Website with WordPress Customizing WordPress Themes How to Make Child Themes

James Bradley
James Bradley
747 Points

Wordpress child themes

Hi,

I am developing a wordpress site locally for the first time. My question is:

Is it good practice to set up a child theme in local development? Does this make it easier when transferring to a live environment?

Thanks,

James

3 Answers

Lucas Santos
Lucas Santos
19,315 Points

You should always make a child theme. Reason for that is because if any theme or plugin has an update and you made a change to that theme or plugin you will probably lose all your changes. That has already happened to me, not a pleasant feeling when all your hard work is just gone. Also it's good to make backups in case anything else goes wrong. Weather you have a child theme or not won't really make a difference as far as difficulty goes when migrating to a live server.

James Bradley
James Bradley
747 Points

Thank you Lucas, I thought as much but just needed to double check. Thanks for the back up tip too!

If you want to make your site go live, you can use Duplicator plugin. wpbeginner has a nice tutorial on using the plugin.