- They are important if you plan on making any edits. If you’re using a theme as-is though, no they are not important
- You do not need them for any site, regardless of size, unless you intend on making an edit to the theme
The benefit that a child theme provides is that you can extend or customize an existing theme while still keeping all of the other functionality of it. If these edits were to be made in the parent theme, then you update it, they would be lost. By using a child theme, you can update the parent and get all the updates, along with keeping your edits to it intact.
If you’re looking at themes that haven’t been updated in a long time, there is a chance they may not be getting one and there is no active maintenance on it. I would recommend staying away from themes like that since there could be vulnerabilities introduced at some point that never get fixed.
As you mentioned, there is a possibility that an update to the parent theme causes a problem with the additions you make in a child theme. The likeliness of that depends on the extent of the changes – adding a CSS file should be fairly unlikely to cause any major problems, but if a class gets changed you may need to rework it slightly to have it apply. If you were to try and write a bunch of custom templates or change existing ones though, you could run into a lot of problems after an update… it all depends
If your additions of the CSS file are not working, I suspect there may just be a problem with how it was done and not because it is added through a child theme.
Hello,
The child theme might be important, it depends if you or whoever created it added any code to override anything or added any new features, etc. What files are in the child theme and what do they do? You have to look at them to figure out if they are important.
If you’re just wondering if a child theme is necessary, it’s not if the parent theme does everything you want it to, but since underscores is pretty basic you will likely have wanted to add some styles. If it isn’t working you may have not loaded it correctly, but since that theme isn’t intended to use with a child theme you could just modify the main theme.
That theme is specifically designed to modify without a child theme and use as a base to create another theme with rather than using it as a parent theme with a child theme.
If you’re looking for something more modern that gets updates frequently check out Sage. I’m sure there are plenty of others and you can always check the WP docs out as well and read up on the FSE or block themes which is the newer page editing system built into WP.
Best of luck!
Ryan
