Templates control the layout of your homepage, blog posts, individual pages, and archive pages on WordPress.com. This guide explains what templates do and how to view, create, edit, apply, reset, and delete them.
A template controls how a page is displayed on your site. Your homepage, your blog posts, your individual pages, and your archive pages are each displayed using a template.
A template defines the layout around your content — the header, the footer, the sidebar, and how content is arranged on the page. People sometimes call this the page layout, the homepage design, or the site design. These all refer to the template.
Templates are shared across pages. If you change a template, every page that uses that template changes at the same time. For example, editing the Pages template updates the layout of every standard page on your site.
A template is not the same as page content. The words, images, and blocks you add to a page are the page content. The template is the layout that surrounds that content. If content you added to a page disappears when you edit a template, learn how to fix content added to a template instead of a page.
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Templates are different from themes. A theme sets the design of your entire site — colors, fonts, and default templates. Templates control the layout of specific pages within that theme.
To see which template a page is using, follow these steps:
- In your site’s dashboard, click Pages.
- Click a page’s name to open that page in the editor.
- In the Page settings sidebar on the right, under Summary, locate the Template option.
- Note the name of the template the page is using.
Most themes include several templates that control different parts of your site. The most common templates are listed below, starting with the homepage.
Most themes include a homepage template that controls the layout of your homepage. Depending on your theme, this template is called Home, “Front Page“, or Index. If your theme includes a Front Page template, WordPress.com uses it as the homepage.
To learn more, see Edit the default homepage template.
- Pages template: Controls the layout of standard pages, such as an About page or a Contact page.
- Single posts template: Controls the layout of individual blog posts.
- Archive template: Controls the layout of category pages, tag pages, and other archive pages.
To see which templates come with your theme, follow these steps:
- Visit your site’s dashboard.
- Navigate to Appearance → Editor.
- Click the Templates option.
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When you first open the Site Editor, it loads whichever template displays the home page of the site.
These guides explain how to work with templates included in block themes. If you use a classic or third-party theme, refer to your theme’s setup guide or documentation for instructions on editing its templates.
- Create a template: Add a new template to your site using the Site Editor, the page editor, or by duplicating an existing one.
- Edit a template: Change the layout, header, footer, or content arrangement of an existing template.
- Apply a template to a page: Assign a different template to one of your pages or posts.
- Reset a template: Return a template to its default state from your theme.
- Delete a template: Remove a custom template you created.
- Fix content added to a template instead of a page: Troubleshoot when page content ends up in a template by mistake.
