Loading stylesheets in WordPress child themes the fast way

Loading stylesheets in WordPress child themes is a pretty straightforward process. According to the Codex, you just add a wp_enqueue_scripts action that loads the parent theme’s stylesheet as well as the child theme’s stylesheet. Easy peasy.

However, you know me and extra asset requests 😉 I hate to request multiple CSS or JS files if I can help it. Loading the parent stylesheet with WordPress’ recommended wp_enqueue_scripts is going to end up making two calls – one for the parent stylesheet and one for the child. We don’t want none of that!

Here’s what I’ve done to get around loading both those stylesheets

Using Sass, I just @import the parent theme’s style.css. That easy!

@import "../twentysixteen/style";

I can’t vouch for the reliability of this in all cases (relative paths for fonts or assets might not work in some themes), but it works for at least the Twenty Sixteen theme!