How to create custom page layouts in WordPress

Check Appearance > Editor. If you see the Site Editor and Templates, your block theme supports visual template editing. You can create layouts with blocks, adjust spacing and typography, and change headers or footers without editing theme files. Block themes are built to edit the site structure with blocks.

If your theme is a classic theme, use a child-theme template when the layout needs a different structure. You can also use the normal page editor for content-only changes, but that will not always remove the theme’s header, sidebar or footer.

With a block theme, open Pages > Add New or edit an existing page. In the page settings sidebar, select the template name, choose the option to add a template, and create a descriptive Custom Template, such as Full Width or Landing Page. Build the layout in the Template Editor with blocks such as Group, Columns, Cover, Image, Buttons and Query Loop. Save the template and the page when finished.

Use a custom template when the layout should be selectable for different pages. Do not confuse it with a page-specific template such as a template created for a particular page or post type, because those may not appear in the template switcher for an arbitrary page.

For a classic theme, create or activate a child theme before changing template files. A child theme lets you override templates while keeping the parent theme available for updates.

Copy the theme’s existing page.php into the child theme, give the copy a distinct filename such as page-templates/landing.php, and add a template-name comment at the top. Put the layout markup and the normal WordPress loop in that file, then select the template from the page editor’s template or attributes setting. For one page only, a file named page-{slug}.php or page-{ID}.php can be used instead, but those files are not general-purpose templates.

Save repeated sections as block patterns, such as a call-to-action, testimonial row or pricing section. You can insert a pattern into a page and customise its content instead of rebuilding the same block structure each time. WordPress also supports synced patterns when the same section must stay consistent across pages.

Keep global elements such as the header and footer in template parts when using a block theme. This prevents you from maintaining separate copies of the same navigation or footer in every page layout.

Preview the layout as a normal page, on a phone and at tablet width. If the page is assigned as the site’s static front page, edit the Front Page template rather than assuming the ordinary Pages template controls it. The blog posts index uses the Blog Home template when that template applies, so a custom page layout assigned to the page selected as the Posts page may not control the posts archive.

If your custom template is missing from the selector, check that you created a selectable custom template, that the active theme supports the editor you are using, and that the template file is in the correct theme location. In a classic theme, page templates can be stored in the theme root or a first-level folder, but nested template folders are not supported.

If you want to design several custom layouts without editing PHP files, use GutenBricks. It provides a block-based drag-and-drop workflow, pre-designed blocks and templates, responsive styling controls, and per-block options for colours, typography and spacing.

Install and activate the plugin, open it from the WordPress editor, choose a starting layout, then replace the demo content and check the responsive views before publishing. This is the quicker route when you want visual control over page sections and reusable designs without learning the theme template hierarchy.