Page Templates & Post Templates

A page template is created to change the way a specific kind of page is built and how it looks. For example: if you have a cooking blog, you might have an about page which would consist of a title and some text. However, you might want to have a page that shows all the recipes that have potatoes in them. In order to do that you would have to code the page to do that by pulling in all those recipes, and that would need to be done on a separate file.

Another very popular example is a full width template. Instead of creating a page with a sidebar, you might want a full width page.

So when creating the page in the admin, you would see a drop down menu allowing you to choose from all the templates that exist in your theme.

It would look something like this:

As you probably noticed, in the image above it says “post template” and not “page template”. That’s because since WordPress 4.7, templates are available for all post types, not just pages.

This matters if you are working with custom post types (CPTs). If you have a “Recipe” CPT or a “Portfolio” CPT registered on your site, before 4.7 you could not easily apply different layouts to individual posts within those types without editing template files directly. From 4.7 onward, you can create a PHP template file that targets one or more post types and let WordPress display a selector in the editor, the same way page templates work.

The key difference from page templates: a post template declared with Template Post Type in its header comment can apply to multiple post types at once. A page template with just Template Name only applies to pages. The following sections cover the exact code for both.

First, create a new PHP file inside your active theme folder (or child theme folder, which is strongly recommended). Name it something descriptive, like page-full-width.php.

The Required Header Comment

Every page template must start with a PHP comment block containing a Template Name line. WordPress reads this comment on activation to register the template. Without it, the template will not appear in the editor dropdown:

<?php
/**
 * Template Name: Full Width
 */

A Minimal Working Template

After the header comment, add the structural WordPress functions your theme relies on. The simplest functional template copies the pattern from your theme’s existing page.php and strips what you don’t need:

<?php
/**
 * Template Name: Full Width
 */
get_header();
while ( have_posts() ) :
    the_post();
    the_content();
endwhile;
get_footer();
?>

In practice, copy your theme’s page.php into the new file, remove the sidebar call if you want a full-width layout, then adjust the HTML wrapper classes to match your CSS. Once the file is saved in the theme folder, create a new page in WordPress, open the Page Attributes panel on the right, and the template will appear in the Template dropdown.

As mentioned above, as of version 4.7 you can create custom templates for any type of post type, no matter if it’s a regular post or a post type you created specifically for your site. Unlike regular page templates, here you can reuse the same template on various post types within the same file. So just name you file something that will make sense when you look at it later and add the following to your new file:

<?php 
/*
Template Name: Full-width layout
Template Post Type: post, page, recipe, movie
*/

Here we have 2 lines:

The first is the same as the page template, this is the name that will appear in the menu drop down. The second row tells us which post types can use this template, so just decide which post types can use the template and add a comma between them.

Assuming you don’t want to create a template that can be reused, you want this template to be used on a specific page and that’s it, this is what you need to do:

Copy your page.php file, create a new file and rename it like this:

1. page-{slug}.php
2. page-{ID}.php

So if your slug is named aboutyou name it: page-about.php.

If your page ID is 255, you name the file: page-255.php.

When to Use Slug vs ID

Use page-{slug}.php when the slug is stable and meaningful (for example, page-contact.php for your contact page). Use page-{ID}.php when you need to target a page that may have its slug changed later, since the page ID never changes. The ID method is also useful for dynamically generated pages where the slug follows a pattern that conflicts with other templates.

Practical Use Cases for Page Templates

• No-sidebar landing page: Copy page.php, remove the get_sidebar() call, and name the template “Landing Page”. Use it for lead capture or sales pages that should not show navigation distractions.
• Custom archive: Create a template that runs a custom WP_Query loop to pull posts from a specific category and display them in a grid format, without being a standard archive URL.
• WooCommerce checkout alternative: Override the default checkout layout by applying a minimal template to the checkout page, stripping the header and footer for a distraction-free purchase flow.