You will hear this often and this is something that WordPress recommends; but if you plan to make custom changes to your theme, whether mine or from someone else, the best way is to use a child theme. You can read more about child themes here: Child Themes The reason for using a child theme is because if updates are available for your theme, in this case the parent theme of Circumference, you won’t lose any custom changes because they were done in the child theme. How this works is that the child theme inherits the styles and functionality of the main theme (the Parent theme), so any updates that happen, it will inherit those. However, if you made any custom changes to the theme, these exist in the child theme and not the parent theme, which is why when you update, you don’t lose the changes. When to Use… read more