You MUST always use a child theme Here's Why?

Child Themes – A Basic Explanation for Beginners

What is a Child Theme?

A child theme is simply a theme that inherits the functionality and looks of another theme – the parent. The whole idea of a child theme is that you can modify, and add to the functionality of that parent theme without modifying it directly. The parent remains intact, everything is built into the child theme.

Why do I need to use one?

Safe Updates
A child theme automatically inherits the parent theme’s features, styles, and templates. This allows you to make changes to your site using child themes without ever modifying the parent theme. When a new version of the parent theme arrives, you can safely update it as all your modifications are saved in the child theme.

Easy to Extend

A child theme built on a powerful theme framework allows a great deal of flexibility without writing a lot of code. You can selectively modify only the template files and functions that you need without going through other template files. You can add new functionality and much more.

Fallback Safe

When you are creating and designing a website you need to think about all the possible scenarios and code or design for them. However, when you are working on a child theme and you forget to code for something, then there is always the parent theme’s functionality available as the fallback option.

The Parent theme provides all of your styling and functionality. The Child theme (when activated)
takes first precedence over the Parent theme for any custom styling or functionality you have added to it.

If your Child theme does not have custom styling or functionality or other .php templates added to it by you, then the Parent styling and functionality takes over and is used instead.

A Simple Example Would Be:

The parent theme’s navigation bar background is blue.
I change the colour in my parent theme style.css to Red
If I update my parent theme, my red would be overwritten and revert back to blue.

However if I change the colour in my child theme style.css to Red and then update my parent theme, my Red navigation bar background colour would remain Red, because the child theme does not get overwritten when the parent theme files are updated.

More Reasons Why you should always use a child theme

Child themes are used when you want to customize or tweak an existing WordPress theme without losing the ability to upgrade or update that same theme.

Most of the time there is no easy way of updating WordPress themes without losing all the custom styling and changes that you had made. We’re not talking about content, we’re talking about styling.

This becomes chaos when all the sudden you find out a widely used script in any popular theme has a major exploit, or vulnerability and you need to update your theme ASAP.

It becomes a tough choice because on one hand, you would lose all the custom styles if you update. On the other hand, you risk your site getting hacked if you don’t update fast enough.

Here is an easy and reliable plugin to automatically create a Child theme

Get the Child theme Plugin (by Serafino)

Child Theme Generator

This plugin actually has been tested with WordPress 4.9.5
and works fine

This plugin will generate a child theme in few steps, quickly and safely, it will not slow down your website or spam your database.
Once you have activated the plugin and created a child theme with it, you can then deactivate and uninstall it. you won’t need it anymore.

By the way, this developer deserves a 5 star review if you can be bothered to support him.

How to use the Plugin?

Install the plugin and activate it. Then go to Admin > Settings > Child-Theme Gen. Then select your parent theme, fill out the fields (optional)and the plugin will create a child theme for you.

Once you have activated the plugin and created a child theme with it, you can then deactivate and uninstall it, you will not need it anymore.

Instructions with Images

https://www.serafinocorriero.it/child-theme-generator/