I inherited a site that didn't use a child theme, and now it needs to be updated. Can I take the original parent theme, change the style sheet header, copy it into the root, delete everything but wp-content and make it be the child theme? In the past, I've loaded any files I wanted from the parent into the child theme, and it is my understanding that the browser will prefer whatever's in the child theme.

I inherited a site that didn't use a child theme, and now it needs to be updated. Can I take the original parent theme, change the style sheet header, copy it into the root, delete everything but wp-content and make it be the child theme? In the past, I've loaded any files I wanted from the parent into the child theme, and it is my understanding that the browser will prefer whatever's in the child theme.

• child-theme

1 Answer 1

That is 100% the approach you should take. You can even set up the child theme with a folder your-child-theme-name/ and then a style.css which uses the parent as the template:

template: your-parent-theme-folder

Then, you can either import the styles into this style.css (@import url('../parent-theme-folder/style.css')) or start from scratch as needed.

You'll also be able to pull in files you want to edit (like header.php or footer.php).

Additional reading:

• https://www.smashingmagazine/2016/01/create-customize-wordpress-child-theme/
• https://developer.wordpress/themes/advanced-topics/child-themes/
• https://www.hostinger/tutorials/how-to-create-wordpress-child-theme