Child Themes are one of the most essential and neglected things when customizing a website. Quite often, people will customize a theme and get their site exactly how they want it, only to see it all wiped away by a theme update. This can be avoided. In this session, I will teach you when you should use a child theme (spoiler alert: it’s all the time), how to set one up and how to use it to customize your website. At the end of the session, everyone will be equipped with the knowledge of how to set up the child theme and also have the ability to download the Twenty Seventeen child theme that I built for WordCamp Buffalo as a starting point with a lot of comments in the style.css and functions.php to explain why I did what I did and how to do similar things to customize their child theme.