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How to Fix Common Twenty Fourteen Child Theme Issues: Styles, Scripts, and Layout

31 threads Sep 16, 2025 Theme → Twenty fourteen

Content

Creating a child theme for the Twenty Fourteen theme is a best practice for making customizations that survive theme updates. However, many users encounter a specific set of problems when setting one up. Based on community reports, the most frequent issues involve stylesheets not loading, layout breaking, and custom functions not working as expected.

Why These Problems Happen

The root cause of most issues is the shift away from using the @import method in the child theme's style.css to load the parent theme's styles. Modern browsers can block this method, leading to a site with no styling. Furthermore, child themes require a specific structure and correct enqueuing of scripts and styles to function properly. Customizations like header images or widget areas are stored in the database and are tied to the specific theme that was active when they were set, so they must be reconfigured after switching to a child theme.

Common Solutions

1. Correctly Enqueue Parent and Child Theme Styles

The most common solution is to replace the outdated @import rule with a proper enqueuing method in the child theme's functions.php file. This ensures all of the parent theme's styles and their dependencies are loaded correctly.

Recommended code for your child theme's functions.php:

<?php
add_action( 'wp_enqueue_scripts', 'theme_enqueue_styles' );
function theme_enqueue_styles() {
    wp_enqueue_style( 'parent-style', get_template_directory_uri() . '/style.css' );
    wp_enqueue_style( 'child-style',
        get_stylesheet_directory_uri() . '/style.css',
        array( 'parent-style' )
    );
}
?>

This code loads the parent stylesheet first, then your child theme's stylesheet, which depends on it. The 'genericons' font dependency from the parent theme is automatically handled by this method.

2. Reconfigure Theme Settings

Settings for the custom header, background, menus, and widget areas are not automatically transferred from the parent theme to the child theme. After activating your child theme, you must revisit Appearance → Header, Appearance → Background, and Appearance → Menus to reconfigure these options.

3. Handle Additional CSS Files

If your parent theme loads additional stylesheets (like ie.css or editor-style.css), they are automatically enqueued by the parent theme's functions. You do not need to enqueue them again in your child theme. The provided code above is sufficient. Attempting to re-enqueue them can cause errors.

4. Troubleshoot Layout and RTL Issues

If your site's layout appears broken or reversed (right-to-left), first ensure your functions.php code is correct and does not contain errors. A common mistake is incorrectly enqueuing multiple stylesheets with the same handle. Verify that the @import rule has been completely removed from your child theme's style.css file.

5. Check for File and Path Errors

If your browser console shows "Failed to load resource" errors for images, it is likely because you copied the entire parent style.css into your child theme. Image paths in CSS are relative. The solution is to only keep your custom CSS in the child theme's stylesheet and use the enqueuing method, or copy the necessary image folders from the parent theme to your child theme directory.

Final Checklist

  • Child theme folder is in /wp-content/themes/.
  • Child theme's style.css contains a valid header with Template: twentyfourteen.
  • The @import rule is removed from style.css.
  • The functions.php file uses the wp_enqueue_scripts action as shown above.
  • Theme settings (headers, backgrounds, menus) have been reconfigured under the child theme.
  • Browser cache has been cleared after making changes.

By following these steps, you should be able to resolve the most common issues encountered when creating a Twenty Fourteen child theme.

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