How to Create a Custom Homepage Template for WordPress

This tutorial goes over how to create a new page template in WordPress. I show how to create a new WordPress page template that I use to start my custom homepage.

How to create a custom WordPress page template

  1. Open your theme files and duplicate the page.php file
  2. I saved my new file called template-home.php into a new directory called templates in my theme files
  3. Add Template Name: Homepage to the comment section of the new template-home.php file to let WordPress know this is a new template
  4. Add or make any customizations to your new template file
  5. Go to the Pages section from the WordPress Dashboard and create a new page or edit an existing page and set the page to use the new template in the right hand column
  6. If you want to set this page to be the default Homepage you need to go to the Settings section from the WordPress Dashboard
  7. From the Settings menu go to Reading and set the Front Page to use the page you set the Homepage template on
  8. You can also set the page you would like the blog posts to be displayed on with the Post Page setting