WordPress child themes are non-negotiable if you're doing any custom development. Not optional. Not "nice to h

WordPress child themes are non-negotiable if you're doing any custom development. Not optional. Not "nice to have."

Here's why this keeps coming up: someone builds a site, customizes the parent theme's functions.php, then the parent theme updates and their changes are gone. Hours of work, lost in a single update.

A child theme inherits all parent theme styles and functionality while keeping your customizations in a separate directory that updates won't touch.

What goes in a child theme:
- Custom CSS overrides
- Additional template files that override parent templates
- Custom functions.php additions
- Any hooks and filters specific to this site

The setup takes 10 minutes. Create a folder in /wp-content/themes/, add a style.css with the proper header declaring the parent theme, and add an empty functions.php.

That's it. Now your customizations survive every theme update.