WP theme update causes child theme CSS problems

Question

I have WP website with a child theme installed which I use for css editing. But, after the last update of the WP theme, I noticed little (but annoying) changes in the appearance of my site (for example: nav menu font size is a bit bigger, some images aren't in the correct order, some page's content has too much margin-top etc.)

Do I need to go through the whole process of fixing this problems or is there some way of reversing back to the previous WP theme version? How should I avoid this problem in the future updates?

Answer 1

It may be possible that your theme author would be able to provide you with a previous version of the theme, not sure though. In regards to how you can avoid this issue in the future, I would recommend performing a backup of your Wordpress files before updating anything (this goes for plugin updates, Wordpress core updates, etc). There are a bunch of plugins out there that can help you with running automated or manual backups.

You could also set up a dev subdomain or recreate the site on a local environment and test any changes you want to make there before making them on your live site.

In any case, I would always recommend running scheduled backups of your site to ensure that you can always roll-back in case something goes wrong. In your case right now however, I would start to take a look at your child theme and fix your styling issues that are conflicting with the theme update.