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

Alan Williams
Alan Williams
5,840 Points

How to set up child theme retrospectively

Hi, I have a live site using a Wordpress theme, but I didn't set up a child theme, how can I do this retrospectively?

2 Answers

I would setup a second - staging site separately - something like stage.mywordpresssite.com, load up the vanilla theme that you used to start with, which will become your parent theme, load in a snapshot of your current live database so you're working on a real site with real content, and then create the child theme structure and migrate the customizations from your live site into the child theme of the staged site. When you're happy that everything is working the way you want, you can move the parent/child theme set to the live site and deploy it there.

Alan Williams
Alan Williams
5,840 Points

Thanks for taking the time to reply, Steve. It will take me a while to get my head around your advice, but I understand and have an idea of what I need to do now.

If you've got any questions along the way, please don't hesitate to ask.

Zac Gordon
STAFF
Zac Gordon
Treehouse Guest Teacher

The best approach would be to strat from scratch and recreate the theme as a child theme.

How would you re-install your wordpress site (without loosing all the content)? - to start properly with the 5 minute install, in order to properly set the theme child