The design and functionality of your website can be greatly customized by making your child themes and custom templates.
To design distinctive layouts for various pages or areas of your website, use custom templates. For your homepage or the pages of your blog posts, for instance, you may design a unique template. To produce these templates, a new PHP file is constructed and template tags are used to output the content of your website.
On the other hand, child themes are utilized to modify an existing theme. Instead of making direct changes to the original theme files, you make a new theme that incorporates the parent theme’s features and aesthetic. This enables you to add custom templates, update the style and functionality, and maintain the integrity of the original theme files. When the parent theme is updated, this is particularly helpful.
You must create a new folder, a style.css file, and a functions.php file in the WordPress theme directory to establish a child theme. The functions.php file should be used to enqueue the parent theme’s stylesheet and to provide customized functionality. The style.css file should contain information about the child theme.
Another option is to use a page builder plugin, which offers a drag-and-drop interface for creating unique layouts, to create custom templates and child themes. Elementor, Beaver Builder, and Divi Builder are a few of the well-known page builder plugins.
Following standard practices for WordPress development and writing clean, well-organized code is crucial when developing custom templates and child themes. This will make it easier to maintain and ensure that your website is compatible with upgrades in the future.