Themes, templates, and pages

When you build a site on WordPress, three layers work together to create what visitors see: your theme, your templates, and your content. This guide explains how these layers work in block themes, which are the most common theme type on WordPress.

Your theme is the overall look and feel of your site. It sets the default colors, fonts, spacing, and layout that apply across every page. When you activate a theme, you’re choosing a starting point for your site’s design.

Learn how to pick the perfect theme.

Inside your theme, templates control the layout of specific types of content. Your site has separate templates for pages, posts, your homepage, archive listings, and more. Each template defines where elements like the header, footer, and content area appear.

When you edit a template, the change appears everywhere that template is used. For example, if you change the header in your Pages template, every page on your site using that template reflects the update.

You view and edit templates in the same Site Editor from Appearance → Editor → Templates.

Learn how to work with your site’s templates.

Your pages and posts are where you add your own content—the text, images, and blocks that make your site yours. This content appears inside the template’s content area. The template provides the surrounding structure (header, footer, sidebar), and your content fills the space in between.

This is the layer you’ll edit most often. You edit pages from Pages and posts from Posts in your dashboard.

Learn how to work with pages and posts.

Here’s how the three layers work together: your theme sets the overall design, your templates define the layout for each type of content, and your content lives in pages and posts. Each layer nests inside the one above it.

Select a theme

Customize template and layout

Create content

When a visitor views one of your pages or posts, WordPress combines all three layers: it takes your theme’s styles, applies the matching template’s layout, and fills in the content you’ve written.

Knowing which layer to edit is the key to working with block themes:

• To change your site’s overall look and feel, select a theme through Appearance → Themes.
• To change the header, footer, or page layout, edit the template in Appearance → Editor → Templates.
• To change the text, images, or blocks on a specific page, edit the page from Pages → select the page.

These guides cover each part of the system in more detail:

• Use the WordPress editor: Learn how to use the editor for your site’s design, pages, and posts
• Templates: View, edit, and create the layouts that structure your pages
• Style your site: Change fonts, colors, and spacing across your site
• Menus: Set up navigation for your site
• Different types of themes: Compare block, classic, and other theme types