Custom page templates are common in the WordPress development life-cycle. Maybe you want to tweak how the header is output, or the footer or just remove something you don’t like the look of.
Follow these steps to create a custom page template:
- Be sure that you are running a child theme. Follow this guide if you have not done this yet.
- Open your site via FTP or Control Panel and navigate to your installation folder.
- Once there, open the ‘wp-content’ folder and select ‘themes’.
- Enter the folder of your currently active theme, assuming it’s ‘Eli’.
- Download the page template you would like to alter, for example ‘single.php’
- Go up one level back to your themes folder and enter your ‘eli-child’ theme folder.
- Upload the downloaded ‘single.php’ file to this folder.
You may do this for any page template you would like to create a custom version of. This will allow you to keep your parent theme up-to-date while still keeping your customization.