How Can I Create a Custom WordPress Theme Using a Theme Builder?

on 16 April 2023, by Bogdan, in Blog, WordPress, Guides

by Bogdan

If you’re looking to create a custom WordPress theme for your website this post is for you. You can do this with a WordPress theme builder, which helps you to design and manage all of your website’s sections simply and intuitively.

When building websites, WordPress themes are important in giving your site a structure and general appearance. Also, they ensure that you don’t have to build everything from scratch. However, you can only customize them to a limited extent, beyond this, you’ll need to have some technical coding knowledge.

WordPress theme builders solve this problem for you. They equip you with a wide range of customization tools to build custom themes that are unique to your website’s needs. In this post, we’ll walk you through how you can create a WordPress theme using a theme builder.

But before we get to the how let’s handle the why first. Because there are multiple reasons why you might want to create a custom WordPress theme.

Why you might want to create a custom WordPress theme?

On its own, WordPress has numerous themes that come with the default install. Since it is an open-source content management system, WordPress has more themes developed for it by independent software vendors. Despite this, it can be difficult to find a single theme that has the specific design and all the functionality that you want for your website.

For this reason, you would want to create a custom theme suited to your WordPress website. This is the main reason why you would want to build a custom WordPress theme for your site. Below are a few more reasons why you might want to do the same.

1: You want to create a unique look for your website

If you want your website to have a look that is unique to your brand, prebuilt WordPress templates may not cut it. When you use a prebuilt theme, your site will likely look generic since numerous website owners might be using the same theme.

With a theme builder, you can create a custom theme that matches your brand identity down to details such as:

Typography
Color scheme
Size & positioning of elements
And many more

A WordPress template builder enables you to create a website with your preferred design and functionality. You’ll be able to build designs for you and by you.

2: You want to save time while building your pages

WordPress allows you to build your site’s pages primarily in two ways: using the default options (classic editor/block editor) and with a page builder plugin. You can use both options to develop unique pages for your website. But with these options, you have to build pages one after the other which takes a lot of time and can lead to inconsistencies in your designs.

To save time and ensure consistency in how you design your site’s pages, you should use a WordPress theme maker. You can design pages, or sections of a page such as a header or a footer once, and choose where on your website the particular design will be applied. This can be throughout your website (global options) or on specific pages (for instance, blog page, shop page, etc.).

By doing this, you won’t have to repeat designing pages or page sections. Also, you will get to minimize the chances of design inconsistencies within your WordPress website.

NOTE: Some page builder plugins offer a theme builder as part of their features. Having one that does is a great advantage.

3: It is cost-effective

The best WordPress themes like Astra, Jupiter, etc., are usually free but you need to pay for the premium versions to get the best of what they offer. This means that you have to be willing to part with some money to get a theme with the design and functionality that you desire.

Alternatively, you can choose to hire designers or developers to generate custom themes for your website. But, their services are often expensive and they take a long time to complete these types of projects.

A WordPress drag and drop theme builder presents you with a cost-effective option for creating custom WordPress themes. You can simply create custom theme templates using your page builder. There is no need to pay for premium theme plugins or hire designers and developers.

4: Your current theme is incompatible with essential plugins

Plugin conflicts are quite common in WordPress. When your theme plugin is incompatible with other essential plugins in your WordPress website, it leads to malfunctions which can eventually cause the white screen of death.

It is important to acknowledge that not only the poorly built themes cause plugin conflicts. Some plugins are just incompatible with each other. For this reason, you’ll have to sacrifice one plugin for another.

Fortunately, with a theme builder, you won’t have to worry about installing theme plugins that may be incompatible with the plugins on your site. You can generate custom themes yourself.

The best part is that a WordPress theme builder permits you to do all this easily. With limited technical knowledge, you can build well-designed custom themes for your WordPress website.

Now that you know why you might want to create a custom WordPress theme, let’s have a look at how you can do this using a WordPress theme builder.

How to Build a Custom WordPress Theme Using a Theme Builder

The first step to building a custom WordPress theme is to get your theme builder. As mentioned earlier, the theme builder is typically a feature offered by WordPress page builder. There are numerous page builders that offer this feature, but the Brizy WordPress Theme Builder stands head and shoulders above the rest, and here’s why.

Create Unique Custom WordPress Themes with Brizy WordPress Theme Builder

Brizy WP Theme Builder is a top wordpress theme builder and a robust solution that gives you the power to build truly unique custom themes for your WordPress website. With this theme builder, you can customize each element of your page and each page of your site. This includes creating dynamic templates for each of the following:

Typical pages - like the blog page, home page, login page, and more
Special pages - the error 404 page, search results page, archive page, etc.
Page sections - like the header, footer, nav bar, etc.

With the customization options available, you can bring your dream site to life. The good news is that you can build from scratch or import templates and edit them. The choice is yours.

The Brizy builder has several types of elements for you to choose from, including essential elements, rows and columns, WooCommerce elements, and social icons. There is no limit to what you can add to your templates.

With the Brizy WordPress Theme builder, you’ll also be able to:

Build the blocks of your custom template quickly

Brizy has pre-built templates for important page sections like the header, footer, call to action, testimonials, etc. You can import these and edit them to your liking. After you’re done building them, you can choose to display these blocks automatically on any page using the builder’s display condition feature. This helps you to design repeatable sections of your custom theme faster.

Create mobile-friendly custom templates

Brizy allows you to optimize your custom theme designs for the three viewports: desktop, tablet, and mobile. Each of the viewports has its own options so you can build unique experiences for each.

As a builder, Brizy is optimized for speed. Also, it is fairly lightweight so it won’t impose long loading times on your WordPress website. This is just a tiny subset of what you can do with the Brizy WordPress theme builder. Now, let’s get into the process, step by step.

How to create a custom WordPress theme using a theme builder (step-by-step)

In this section, we’ll go through a step-by-step process on how you can build a custom WordPress theme using the Brizy WordPress Theme Builder.

Step 1: Install Brizy Free on your WordPress website

From your WordPress dashboard, go to Plugins > Add New.
Search for Brizy and click on Install Now once it appears among the search results.
Click on Activate once the installation is complete.

Now that Brizy is installed, we can get the PRO version.

Step 2: Step up to PRO

To get the PRO version, go to the Brizy website: https://www.brizy.io/ and scroll down to purchase a PRO version. All the PRO plans have the theme builder offering so select the one that you want and complete the purchase.

After completing the purchase, log into your Brizy account. On the dashboard, you will see a download button for the Brizy WordPress PRO, click on it to download. To install it on your website:

Log into your WordPress dashboard and go to Plugins > Add New and click the Upload Plugin button.
Select the extension you’ve just downloaded and click Install Now > Activate. After this, you need to activate your PRO license.
Go back to your Brizy Account and click on the WordPress licenses tab.
Copy your license key and paste it under Brizy > Settings > Licenses.
Click on Activate and that’s it.

With Brizy PRO installed, you can now use the theme builder to build custom templates.

Step 3: Create custom WordPress themes

You can use the Brizy Builder to create custom templates for different types of pages including post pages, error 404, tag pages, author pages, etc. To create a custom template:

From your WordPress dashboard, hover on Brizy on the left sidebar and click on templates.
Click on the Add New button and give your template a name for instance ‘custom post page’.
Click Publish then Edit with Brizy to start editing your custom template. Click the Start Building your Page button in the middle.

Here, you can choose to create your own layout from scratch or import prebuilt layout templates from the Layouts tab.

Each template provided has multiple different layouts, so you can choose the variation that works for you. After importing a template of your choice, you can edit each element of the layout to create a unique custom theme.

Apart from importing whole page templates, you can build your custom theme one section after the other. Brizy has template blocks for different page sections like the header, main content, footer, call to action, testimonials, pricing, etc.

You can pick any template you want and then edit each element. You’ll be able to:

Add or remove elements
Customize the font styling
Edit the sizes, positions, and alignment of elements

It also has a features template block that you can use when you want to create a template for your WooCommerce product pages.

As you create your templates, Brizy allows you to view them from mobile, desktop, and tablet views so that you create a responsive custom theme.

4. Once done making your edits, you can choose where this template will be applied on your site using the Display Conditions feature. To do this, click on the mixer icon to open the settings bar.

5. On the settings bar, click on Menu and select the Make it Global option.

6. A display conditions link will appear, click on it and select Add new condition.

7. Select the pages for which you want this template to apply and click Save once you’re done.

8. When you’re done with all your settings, click on Update.

There we have it! You’ve just created a custom WordPress theme.

Conclusion

Creating a custom WordPress theme allows you to have templates that are optimized to suit your website’s needs. On its own, WordPress doesn’t allow you to build custom themes, for this, you will need a WordPress theme builder plugin.

Brizy’s WordPress Theme Builder feature allows you to generate a wide variety of themes suited for different websites. This theme builder gives you the option to build your custom theme from scratch or import prebuilt templates and customize each element to your preference.

Check Out Brizy WordPress Theme Builder

Article by Bogdan

Co-founder & Head of Design, Bogdan has a passion for everything that works great and looks awesome. Guilty for most of the UI and UX around this place, you can say "Hi" to him at bogdan at brizy dot io