Recently I received another interesting question from one of my clients. He was looking for a simple and safe method of customizing his theme with various CSS customization codes, and he encountered a major stumbling block: he was unable to find the corresponding theme files.

And let's face it, that's a very common issue ... If you are a beginner or a regular user and you want to customize your theme, you'll have to learn which template file(s) to edit in order to get the desired results.

But let's start with the beginning ...

The theme is the “graphical engine” of your Wordpress website. The active theme will define the look of your site and of course, will allow you to customize the visual elements displayed in the front-end area. Obviously, as a first step, you'll have to find a suitable theme, and a few months ago I already published a tutorial on this topic ... In case you haven't seen it yet, here it is again:

How to choose the perfect theme for your website

But here's the thing ... Despite the title of the above tutorial, finding a 100% perfect theme is almost impossible ... Since each site has different requirements, and every single theme comes from a different source and different developers it's extremely hard to find a perfect match ... In other words: sooner or later you'll want to change things, to customize the appearance of certain elements, to add features, etc.

The problem? Each theme has its own structure, containing several template files used to control the appearance of a particular section, page or element ... For example, usually, the single.php file will define the appearance of your posts ... But it's not the only file to do that! And certain themes won't have a single.php file at all ... In which case, you'll have to locate the corresponding alternate templates ...

The point: each theme has its own template hierarchy, and you'll have to figure out which template file(s) to edit in order to get the desired results. And needless to say, you can easily crash your site if you are trying to edit the wrong file ...

This is is why I've decided to create this short tutorial where I will show you how to easily find out which files to edit when you are trying to customize your theme.

Interested?

Let's do this!