Is it possible to slow down site with a bulky child theme?

Question

I am creating a child theme for my theme and as I go through all the modifications that I want, I am almost overriding all the templates and adding a functions to the theme and had to dequeue some styles and scripts to be able to override it.

While I know overriding the templates has no effect on the speed, because the parent templates dont get loaded when there is a child version, but I don't know how much (if any) resources the loading of unused functions in the parent take up or if dequeing many styles and scripts take up resources.

So the question is if there comes a point sometime in child theme development when it is better to take over the theme development and just integrate the changes and use without a child theme? Or is it not worth thinking about there is probably little to no difference between using a child theme with a lot of overrides to using a modified parent theme?

Answer 1

Yes. There is a definitely a point where you just want to create a new theme.

Unless you are writing more than a thousand lines of code, I would not be worried about performance problems with your child theme, if the parent theme is well-constructed.

Adding conditional statements to test if scripts and styles are needed for certain pages will improve site response, not reduce it. The amount of processing time for the server to test three PHP if statements is negligible.