Page Templates & Post Templates

A page template changes what WordPress renders for a specific page, letting you give one page a completely different layout from everything else on your site. The dropdown under Page Attributes in the WordPress editor lists every template file your theme has registered, and selecting one swaps the default layout for that page only.

In practice, here is where this matters:

• Full-width landing pages: Your theme’s default layout probably includes a sidebar. For a lead capture page or promotional page, you want the full browser width without a sidebar and possibly without the standard header. A page template strips those out for just that one page.
• Portfolio or case study pages: A portfolio page typically needs a grid layout and a custom query to pull in project posts, which the default page.php cannot provide. A dedicated template file handles the custom loop and layout.
• Client-specific pages: If you are building a multi-section site where one segment has a different color scheme or header, a page template can load a different stylesheet or header file for pages assigned to that template.
• WooCommerce checkout overrides: You can create a minimal WordPress page template that strips the site header and footer for a distraction-free checkout experience, then apply it to the WooCommerce checkout page.

You would see the template selector in the WordPress editor here:

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.

Copy your page.php file, create a new file and rename it using one of these patterns:

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

If your slug is about, name the file page-about.php. If your page ID is 255, 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 specific page but its slug might change later, since page IDs never change in WordPress.

Practical Use Cases for Specific-Page Templates

• No-sidebar landing page: Copy page.php, remove the get_sidebar() call, and save it as page-landing.php. Every page with that slug gets the full-width layout automatically.
• Custom archive page: Build a template that runs a custom WP_Query loop pulling posts from a specific category into a grid layout, attached to a specific slug like page-recipes.php.
• Distraction-free checkout: Create a minimal template without header navigation and save it as page-checkout.php. WooCommerce’s checkout page typically uses the slug “checkout,” so this template applies automatically.
• Client presentation pages: For pages that serve as client-only dashboards or private previews, a slug-based template can load a different header and hide the main navigation just for that URL, without any editor interaction required.

Conditional Logic Inside Any Template

You can also use the is_page_template() conditional inside your regular page.php to apply different markup to pages assigned to a specific template, without creating separate files. This is useful when the layout difference is minor, such as just hiding the sidebar on certain pages:

if ( is_page_template( 'page-full-width.php' ) ) {
    // skip the sidebar
} else {
    get_sidebar();
}