Making a WordPress Theme from Scratch
Since WordPress is an open-source content management system (CMS) that’s popular all over the world, you should be able to find resources on how to do just about anything online. You can learn how to make the most of WordPress and its incredible power and versatility.
One of the best ways to maximize WordPress is to create your own theme, which will help you take control of how your website is presented and managed by WordPress. For those who may be worried that it’s a complicated process, rest assured that it isn’t once you understand how WordPress themes work.
It’s indeed a significant task, but it’s not impossible or even that difficult. As long as you know how to design basic web pages, you can get a handle on making your own WordPress theme that will look and function exactly how you want it.
Advantages of Making Your Own Custom WordPress Theme
A custom-built theme is a lot more than what it seems on the surface, and there are advantages to making your own over using one that someone else made. For instance, starting from a clean slate means you won’t have to sift through someone else’s code. If you want to make your own custom elements, you can just do it yourself without having to reverse engineer anything.
Not using someone else’s code also gives you the advantage of not having to be limited to someone else’s settings. Also, as long as you keep the code neat, you can keep it optimized, which lends to site performance. By developing your own WordPress theme, you can add and remove things as you please, so you can control the bloat and keep page load times down.
That’s only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to what you can achieve by making your own WordPress theme. Let’s now take a look at what goes into making your own theme.
How to Create a WordPress Theme from Scratch
Web designers are partial towards WordPress due to many reasons. Not only is it because WordPress is the most popular CMS online, but also because themes in that platform are really simple. They follow a modular system that’s easy to learn and understand.
You basically take an HTML file and split it up to different parts—like the header, body, sidebar, and footer—and have each of them in a separate file. You then define the visual elements through CSS, and that’s pretty much how WordPress themes are structured.
If that’s not what you wish to do, you can also make one with a WordPress theme builder. While it’s not as in-depth as writing the code, theme builders like Elementor offer a great deal of power and variety in visual and functional customization.
Steps to Creating Your Own WordPress Theme:
1. Install WordPress
Let’s assume you know how to install WordPress into your website through FTP. Just unzip the WordPress CMS into your public_html folder and get it started.
2. Choose How You Want to Create a WordPress Theme
As aforementioned, there are two ways to go about this. There’s the manual way, which is coding it from scratch. Then, there’s the automated way, which is using a WordPress theme builder like Elementor to create one. Both ways are valid, but each has its own advantages and disadvantages.
WordPress themes are stored in the wp_content directory within a folder in the themes subdirectory. Name the folder as the name of the theme itself.
3. Learn the Structure of a WordPress Theme
A typical WordPress theme has a structure consisting of these different components—header, body, sidebar, and footer.
Therefore, you get the following files to fill up.
header.php — contains code for the header section.
index.php — contains code for the body of the home page.
home.php — contains code for the body of the post archive page.
single.php — contains code for the body of single posts.
page.php — contains code for the body of pages.
footer.php — contains code for the footer section.
style.css — responsible for the styling of the theme.
4. Write the Code for the WordPress Theme
Remember how there are different parts of an HTML file, from the <head> to the <body> and the footer at the bottom? WordPress themes work the same way, so you can write your HTML code as usual, but you then split them up to those different files.
The theme development process for WordPress is well-documented and there are tons of tutorials available for free online. You can pick one and follow along, and you’ll be able to create basic WordPress themes in no time.
You can also take one of the default WordPress themes (the ones named after the year they were released) and edit the code to your liking. That’s actually a good way to learn how WordPress themes work. If you’re willing to put time into tinkering with it, you can reverse engineer those themes and create one that’s entirely your own.
5. Install the WordPress Theme
Once you’re done making your theme, it’s time to use it on your WordPress site. Upload it to the themes subdirectory in the wp_content directory. You can then go to your WordPress backend and proceed to the Themes page under Appearance to activate your theme.
More recent iterations of WordPress allow you to further customize your theme with the built-in theme editor. You may also use a theme builder like Elementor to further customize and enhance your theme so it does exactly what you want it to do for your website.
Of course, it’s far from the end. You’ll have to keep working on it to make sure that everything shows up right and the interactive elements work as they should. You can edit the theme in the theme editor to fine-tune your theme in real time while your website is live.
Conclusion
While the process itself can be grueling, the concept is actually quite simple. You can make a basic WordPress theme easily enough with HTML and CSS, and there’s room for growth through PHP and JavaScript, as well as making use of frontend frameworks in development.
While there are many other ways to do this, like using a theme builder or some other technology, knowing how to do it from scratch can help you better grasp what your website needs and how to achieve them.
