Master WordPress 2025: How to Create Custom Page Templates & Dynamic Layouts Today
4Are you struggling to customize individual pages in WordPress? In this step-by-step tutorial, I’ll show you how to create custom page templates and make them dynamic using WordPress functions. This will allow you to create different layouts for different pages—a crucial skill for every WordPress developer!
🔗 Watch the Previous Lessons First:
🎬 Lesson 1: Create Your First WordPress Theme
🎬 Lesson 2: Add Headers, Footers & The Loop
🎬 Lesson 3: Custom Menus, CSS & JavaScript
🎬 Lesson 4: Custom Homepage & Blog Page
📌 What You’ll Learn in This Video:
✅ How WordPress' Template Hierarchy works
✅ How to create custom page templates
✅ How to apply different templates to different pages
✅ How to use conditional logic to make layouts dynamic
✅ How to modify index.php to serve as a universal fallback
🛠 Step 1: Understanding WordPress Template Hierarchy
WordPress automatically selects the right template for different types of pages. The order of priority is:
1️⃣ A specific template (like front-page.php, home.php)
2️⃣ A custom page template (which we’ll create today)
3️⃣ page.php (default template for all pages)
4️⃣ index.php (fallback for everything)
This means that if a page doesn't have a custom template, WordPress will use page.php, and if that doesn’t exist, it falls back to index.php.
🛠 Step 2: Create a Default page.php Template
Right now, all pages are using index.php as a fallback. Let's fix that by creating a default page template.
1️⃣ In your theme folder (my-first-theme), create a new file named page.php
2️⃣ Add code in video.
🔹 What this does:
Displays the title of the page.
Uses The Loop to show page content.
Loads header and footer automatically.
Now, every new page you create in WordPress will use page.php by default.
🛠 Step 3: Create a Custom Page Template
Let’s say you want a special layout for certain pages, like a "Contact Us" page. We’ll create a custom page template that you can apply to any page.
1️⃣ In your theme folder, create a new file named template-contact.php
2️⃣ Add code from video.
🛠 Step 4: Assign the Custom Template to a Page
Now that we've created template-contact.php, let’s assign it to a page in WordPress.
1️⃣ In the WordPress Admin, go to Pages → Add New
2️⃣ Create a new page named “Contact”
3️⃣ On the right sidebar, under "Page Attributes," find "Template"
4️⃣ Select "Contact Page" from the dropdown
5️⃣ Click Publish
✅ Now, this page will use template-contact.php instead of page.php!
🛠 Step 5: Modify index.php as a Fallback
Since we now have dedicated templates for pages (page.php) and blogs (home.php), we should modify index.php to act as a universal fallback for any other type of content.
1️⃣ Open index.php and update the code: