Do You Need a Divi Child Theme?

Firstly, we are talking about blank Divi Child Themes, not fully built Child Themes. Okay, you’ve been told that you need a Child Theme for Divi. Is this true? Not entirely! Let me explain. If your plan is to use the Divi Theme and your intention is to use the myriad of inbuilt features and settings to build your website, then you’re probably not going to need a child theme. If you want to play around with a little bit of custom CSS or even add a few snippets of jQuery to your site, you can do all of this within Divi, the settings won’t be overidden by updates and again, you don’t require a child theme.

If however, you are likely to customise the hell out of Divi and your aim is to really make your website stand out from the crowd by using lots of custom CSS and additional functionality with PHP or JavaScript, you will most definitely need a child theme.

Why?

The problem with using Divi for all your customisations is that all your code and settings can be in numerous places and can become difficult to track down when changes are to be made. Changes MUST NOT under any circumstances be made to WordPress or Divi core files. It’s simple, if you do, all your work will be deleted in the next update. A Child Theme overcomes this by having duplicate files which are used alongside the parent files which won’t be updated. As an example, the Divi parent theme and the Divi Child Theme both have style.css files. You would place all your custom CSS in your child theme file. This makes it easier to make any changes as all customisations are together.

Which Files?

Common files which appear in a child theme are: style.css custom.js function.php header.php footer.php The only two that are required are the style.css and functions.php as these have information required by the parent theme. There are many other files which can be added to and customised in the child theme. Simply download the zip file and upload it to your WordPress site. Activate and play around with the files