All our themes come with an ever-expanding collection of page templates. These are meant to provide dynamically generated content in a static page.
You can customize our WordPress themes by adding as many page templates as you need to. Please note that it’s highly recommended that you do this through a child theme, since that will protect all your work from theme updates and changes.
Creating Custom Page Templates
The easiest way to do this is to take the existing theme’s page.php file, and make a copy of it.
You can then rename this new file however you want, although it’s recommended to use the same naming scheme as our existing templates: using the template- prefix. Your resulting file could be named like this:
template-custom.php
Afterwards, open this new file and look for the PHP comment located at the very top. You should see something like this:
<?php /* Template Name: Sitemap */ ?>
This line tells WordPress what the name of the page template is, and will be show in the template selector of the page edit interface. You can then rename the Sitemap portion of the template so it has an original name.
Customize Your Template
Once you’ve done this, your page template is ready to be customized. As soon as you place it in the theme’s root folder, WordPress will detect it and display it on the template dropdown menu.
You can then start making any changes you need to the page’s layout.