With WordPress themes, You can very easily change the design of your blog. There are thousands of free and premium WordPress themes available for almost any type of blog. In this article, I am going to list some free plugins to create WordPress child themes.

I have also published a tutorial for beginners, in this step by step tutorial, you can learn How To Create WordPress Child Themes manually without using any plugin.

According to official WordPress documentation:

A child theme is a theme that inherits the functionality and styling of another theme, called the parent theme. Child themes are the recommended way of modifying an existing theme. https://codex.wordpress.org/Child_Themes

There are two ways to create WordPress themes, You can choose a theme created by someone else or by you from scratch or you can customize any WordPress theme with WordPress child themes.

In this article, I am not going to explain how to create a WordPress child theme. You can read WordPress Parent And Child Theme Development Guide For beginners to learn the basics of WordPress theme development.

In this article, I am going to list some of the most popular and best WordPress child theme plugins.

With WordPress child theme plugins, You can create child themes quickly and very easily.

Ever since WordPress 3.0, you shouldn’t directly modify CSS of any downloaded themes because if you update the theme, your changes will be destroyed.

Instead, it is recommended that you create a child theme and edit the CSS there so that updates to the parent theme will be inherited instead of overriding your changes.

Important Reasons to Create Child Themes

• Keep your changes when the parent theme is updated.
• Reduce duplicated code i.e. you need to copy and customize only the files that need to be customized
  Child Themes are often very small in size and can easily be shared and used for another project.
• It is a recommended method to customize WordPress themes
• With child themes, You can save a lot of your time. No need to create a theme from scratch.
• and a lot more….

10 Free WordPress child theme plugins

Here is a list of 10 free WordPress child theme plugins.

1. Child Theme Configurator

This free WordPress child theme plugin requires WordPress 3.9 or higher. With 80000+ active installs, this one is most popular WordPress child theme plugin.

Child Theme Configurator parses and indexes your stylesheet so that every CSS media query, selector, property, and value are at your fingertips.

Second, Child Theme Configurator plugin shows you how each customization you make will look before you commit it to the child theme.

Related Tutorial: How To Add Arrow In WordPress Menus With CSS without using Jquery Or PHP

Finally, it saves your work so that you can customize styles in your child themes without the risk of losing your edits.

You can create any number of child themes from your existing Parent Themes. Child Theme Configurator lets you choose from your installed themes (even existing child themes) and save the results in your Themes directory.

Download Child Theme Configurator Plugin

2. One-Click Child Theme

This free WordPress child theme plugin requires WordPress 3.0 or higher. One-Click Child Theme plugin adds a Theme option to any active theme allowing you to make a child theme.

You can use this free plugin to create WordPress child theme with one click. One-Click Child Theme is created by Terry Chay.

With 70,000+ Active Installs, this is one of the most popular WordPress child theme plugins.

One-Click Child Theme plugin attempts to get around the issue of the lengthy child theme development process, by adding a button to the themes page to allow you to child theme the page. (It’s not really one-click, though.)

Download One-Click Child Theme Plugin

3. Child Theme Creator by Orbisius

More than 20,000+ WordPress users are using this plugin to create a child theme from any theme that they have currently installed on your site/blog.

Child Theme Creator by Orbisius requires WordPress 3.4 or higher and it is an up to date WordPress child theme plugin.

Related Tutorial: How To Show WordPress Post Excerpt On Home Page Not Full Post

With Child Theme Creator by Orbisius allows you can quickly edit theme files from Appearance > Orbisius Theme Editor (entry added by the same plugin) It features two editors and you can pick snippets from one theme and paste into another.

Download Child Theme Creator by Orbisius Plugin

4. Child Theme Check

If you are using a child theme on your blog, then Child Theme Check is a very useful plugin. You should definitely check out this free plugin.

Child Theme Check plugin warns you about outdated template files in your child theme and shows a different view of the changes between parent and child theme template.

Child theme check is the one plugin, which helps you keeping track of changes in the parent theme when they are updated. This free plugin requires WordPress 3.4 or higher.

Download Child Theme Check Plugin

5. Childify Me

With 9000+ active install, this one is another popular and up to date WordPress child theme plugin. You can create child themes from any non-child theme directly from WordPress Theme Customizer.

Childify Me handles FTP credential requests in the Theme Customizer and also generates child-theme’s screenshot. Which is generated from the parent screenshot, with a ribbon dynamically added?

This plugin creates child-theme’s author dynamically from the User Name and Last Name, if set, otherwise falls back to a generic “Administrator”.

Childify-Me is currently available in Italian, Russian, Ukrainian, Portuguese, Dutch and Hebrew.

Download Childify Me

Other WordPress Child Theme Plugins

• Child Theme Wizard 5000+ active Installs
• Child Themify 20,000+ active installs
• Child Themes 400+ Active Installs
• Easy Child Theme Creator 400+ active installs
• Wpp Easy Child Generator 20+ active installs