Why do you have to enqueue a stylesheet in wordpress?

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Why do you have to enqueue the parent theme stylesheet in a WordPress child theme? I’ve created style.css in the child theme and when I add a change to it, it works without the functions.php file that enqueues the parent stylesheet, such as changing the background color of an element. I’ve searched for and answer but can find nothing that tells my why. Everything just says that you have to.

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  1. When it comes to loading the styles in WordPress themes there are many ways to skin a cat.

    Parent enqueues child style.css –
    In some themes the parent style.css is enqueued with wp_enqueue_style() within the parent theme php code.

    The 2015 default theme is an example of this method. In functions.php line 233 there is the line wp_enqueue_style( 'twentyfifteen-style', get_stylesheet_uri() );. When the theme is standalone get_stylesheet_uri() returns the theme’s own style.css. When a child theme is present get_stylesheet_uri() returns the child theme style.css.

    The above is the likely case for your parent theme.

    Child enqueues parent style.css –
    From the child theme you can load the parent styles by by one of two methods.

    1. enqueue_style() with parameters pointing to the parent theme. Some php similar to: wp_enqueue_style( 'parent-style', get_template_directory_uri() . '/style.css' );. This is the method you are talking about.
    2. @import from within the child theme style.css file. A typical line of code for this would read: @import url( '../parent-theme-folder/style.css' );. This is not ideal as @import slows down your page load time.

    Better Method – Don’t use root style.css
    It’s not strictly necessary to use style.css in the root folder at all. The only thing WordPress strictly needs this file for is to read the theme information in the top comments. This very requirement means that the style.css can’t be minimised, or at least is a pain to minimise. Minimising is the process of removing all the spaces in a file of code to reduce the file size. This reduces page load speed.

    So now a lot of modern themes are enqueuing their main style from a different minimised css file in a theme subfolder. The main style.css simply consists of the informational comment section read by the core php code but not loaded on the front end.

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