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Your Ultimate Guide to WordPress Page Templates

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WordPress Page Templates

WordPress is a well-known CMS which powers more than 70 million websites on the internet. Another reason why it is much more popular is because it offers a lot of themes and plugins to build your website as per your needs.

If you are looking to set up a website with WordPress then you might be wondering whether is there is a way or a method to add custom designs to various pages or not.

This is the situation where WordPress page templates come in the role.

If you don’t know about the template and how you can set up it then you can follow this short guide. Once reading out this article you will get a complete idea about WordPress templates and how to set up it.

What do you mean by WordPress page template?

On page template the WordPress design functions. In simple, you can say that page template is some files that will tell WordPress that how your website will look like or style. When any new visitor visits your website to style the page the WordPress will look for the best template.

To use a theme you need WordPress. The themes are usually included with the various page templates to style your web content. You will find some themes are available for free whereas some of them can be purchased through a third party.

By editing the template files you can easily customize the theme to the way you want. Customizing the template files will change the complete appearance and layout of your content.

  • Building a child theme

You should always create a child theme before editing the WordPress theme’s template files. This will actually minimize your work.

First of all, it will safeguard the theme that you are currently using. You will be able to switch to your previous theme even if the changes you made are not working well.

Your modification can be overwritten if the parent theme is updated. From these updates, the child theme will protect all your website customizations.

  • Building custom page template

Another reason why WordPress is the most well-known CMS is because it is flexible in every aspect. You need to locate the template which is the default to modify the page template.

Mostly the pages.php is the template for pages. This file will tell WordPress that how they can easily style website pages. The file which tells how to style pages of the archive is the archives.php.

You can even copy the existing template to start a new one. This means you will not need to start coding from the beginning.

After copying the file you can also start modifying it. And once you are done with the modification process you can upload that file again to WordPress.

  • Adding the template

The major point that why you should use WordPress template is because it saves your time and effort from coding a similar kind of design each time. Once you can customize the template you just need to add it to the pages where you want it to get appeared.

The task of applying templates in WordPress is a very easy task. From your WordPress dashboard, you can easily edit as well as you can add new pages.

After this, you need to find the page attribute section. You will be able to find the available page template’s drop-down menu.

Now you can save the pages after selecting the custom page template. WordPress will look for the template of a custom page to retrieve the page for your visitors.

  • Preview the page

Before publishing always make sure you are checking on its previews. To know how the modifications are reflecting on your website you can preview the page in WordPress.

  • Template’s uses

Templates can be considered as the most important part of a WordPress website but custom templates do have some major uses.

The very common is of WordPress templates is to showcase custom content.

Also, it can be used to build customized archive pages for your website.

Also the most importantly it is used for creating 404 error pages.

Your website can be your own

Knowing how WordPress page template works and how to use is with CMS is important. You will be able to create a beautiful website that is custom made if you have proper knowledge of WordPress templates.

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