How-to · Intermediate · 30 minutes
How to Create a WordPress Child Theme
Customise a theme in a way that survives the next update intact — a practical, jargon-free walkthrough with the classic mistake flagged before you make it.
Straight answer first
The job: customise a theme in a way that survives the next update intact. Time to allow: 30 minutes. Skill needed: intermediate.
The walkthrough below covers every step, the mistake most people make, and the shortcut worth keeping. On Hosting Seller plans several of these steps are already done for you, and we say where.
Written by the Hosting Seller staff · Checked 1 August 2026
Intermediate
Skill needed
5
Stages to finish
Free
Help included
Tested
On our own kit
This guide assumes no expertise at all — just a hosting account, a browser and 30 minutes of attention. Every instruction works on our platform exactly as written, and carries over to any standard cPanel host.
Rule of the road: read the snag section before you begin rather than after. It is harvested from the tickets of people who did it the other way round.
The shape of the work
The job breaks into a few clear stages: understand why it exists, create the folder and its stylesheet, load the parent theme's styles, activate and compare and override things on purpose.
No stage needs code or a terminal unless the guide says so outright, and where it does, the exact commands are printed. The full step-by-step sits below; the sections around it give the context that makes it stick.
The classic snag
Getting the Template line wrong. It must match the parent's folder name exactly, not the pretty name shown in the dashboard, or the child theme appears in the list broken with a missing-parent error beside it.
Forewarned really is forearmed here. This one mistake accounts for most of the frustration the subject produces, and it is entirely avoidable once somebody names it.
The trick worth borrowing
For nothing but CSS tweaks, the Customizer's Additional CSS box also survives updates. A child theme starts earning its setup time when you need to change templates or functions, not for twenty lines of styling.
It costs a minute now and pays that back every time the job comes round again — which, like most hosting jobs, it certainly will.
What you can skip on a Hosting Seller plan
Several steps in this guide exist only because hosting historically made you do them. On our plans SSL issues itself, backups run daily without being asked, and one-click installers replace the manual setup entirely. What is left is the part that is genuinely yours.
Stuck halfway through at an odd hour? That is exactly what round-the-clock human support is for — tell us where you are in this guide and we will pick it up from there.
A good platform makes every guide shorter
Tutorials age badly when they are written against imaginary hosting. These are written against ours: the same panel, the same installer and the same defaults you will meet.
Order an annual plan and the first year of your domain registration is on the house.
- Step by step, tested exactly as printed
- The snag flagged before you reach it
- The dull steps are already automated
- People on hand at any hour if you stall
Why Hosting Seller
On every plan, as standard
Help on the counter
Stuck on step three at midnight? Support answers at any hour, mid-guide included.
Automation where it belongs
SSL, backups and installs run themselves here, so the guide covers only what is genuinely yours to do.
The snag, named early
The classic mistake for this exact job is flagged before step one, so 30 minutes stays 30 minutes.
5 steps, no filler
Each stage is a few minutes of steady clicking, with the fiddly parts marked as fiddly.
The undo is always named
Where a step could bite, the guide says so and tells you how to put it back again.
Scoped honestly
Customise a theme in a way that survives the next update intact is a intermediate-level task — this guide budgets 30 minutes and says which steps the platform absorbs.
First Steps
From choosing to live
- 1
Understand why it exists
Anything you edit directly inside a theme is wiped the next time that theme updates. A child theme inherits everything from the parent while keeping your changes in a separate folder the updater never touches.
- 2
Create the folder and its stylesheet
Make a new folder in wp-content/themes containing a style.css whose header includes the line Template: parent-theme-folder-name. That one line is what creates the inheritance.
- 3
Load the parent theme's styles
Add a functions.php that enqueues the parent stylesheet properly. This has replaced the old @import trick, which still works but loads slower and is no longer the recommended route.
- 4
Activate and compare
Switch to the child theme under Appearance, then Themes. The site should look completely unchanged — a child theme is invisible until you actually override something.
- 5
Override things on purpose
Put CSS in the child's style.css. For template changes, copy the parent's file into the child at the same path and edit the copy; WordPress prefers the child's version automatically wherever one exists.
In the Box
Packed with every plan
- WordPress Toolkit, with updates applied for you
- Spam and virus filtering fitted to every mailbox
- Upgrades apply to the account in place, with no move between plans
- Nothing added at setup — no joining fee, ever
- PHP versions picked per site from the panel
- Site migration done for you by our staff, at no charge
- DDoS filtering handled out at the network edge
- The renewal price printed on the tag matches the order price
- Staging copies so changes get tested before they go live
- Mailboxes that carry your own domain name
Across the Counter
The questions we get asked most
Are child themes still needed with a block theme?
Less often than they used to. Full-site editing keeps your customisations in the database, where updates cannot reach them. Child themes remain the right tool for code-level work: custom functions and template parts the editor cannot reach.
Can a child theme be added to a theme that somebody already edited?
Yes, but the edits already made directly to the parent have to be found and moved into the child before the next update deletes them. Compare the live theme against a fresh download of the same version and the differences show themselves.
Does hosting come with mailboxes?
It does — mailboxes on your own domain ship with every hosting plan, with webmail, IMAP, POP and SMTP access and spam filtering fitted as standard. There is also standalone email hosting for domains whose website lives somewhere else entirely.
Where do the servers actually sit?
Our hosting runs from European datacentres with London at the centre, behind server-level caching that keeps cached pages quick for visitors anywhere. For most sites the build of the platform — NVMe disks, LiteSpeed, sensible numbers of accounts per machine — decides the speed far more than the postcode does.
How quickly can I be up and running?
Minutes, not days. The account opens the moment the order clears, the domain — free for year one on annual plans — attaches straight away, and the one-click installer puts WordPress or any of 400+ applications on the page before you leave your chair. Already have a site elsewhere? Hand it over and we move it free, usually inside a day.
Do you shift an existing site across at no charge?
We do. Open a ticket with the login details for your current host and the whole lot comes over: files, databases, mailboxes and configuration. You check the copy before DNS changes hands, and the old site keeps serving customers until the new one takes the traffic, so nobody ever sees a gap.
Can I test changes somewhere safe first?
Yes — plans with staging let you clone the live site, work on the copy, then push it across when you are satisfied. It is the difference between hoping an update behaves and knowing that it does before any customer meets it.
Read next
How to Enable Two-Factor Authentication
Make a stolen password useless on every login that actually matters — beginner level, about 15 minutes.
How to Set Up a Catch-All Address
Decide whether catching mistyped addresses is worth it, then set it up safely — intermediate level, about 5 minutes.
AI Website Builder
Describe the site and the AI builder drafts it on real hosting.
Domain Names
Search, register and transfer names — year one free with annual hosting.
Packing up and moving host? Take our checklist.
A plain running order for a move nobody notices: what to copy first, how to carry email across without dropping a single message, when to point DNS, and the two slips behind nearly every hour of downtime we get called about.
Whenever you're ready to order.
Every plan carries the essentials other hosts ring up as extras — and support that actually replies.
See the plans