How to Create a New Page Template in WordPress Without Breaking Your Design

Your site is running smoothly, everything looks tidy — until a new idea shows up. Let’s say you run a news site where every article has a featured image in a perfect 16:9 format. It all looks consistent and clean… until you start a new section. For example, a meme roundup. The problem? Meme images come in all shapes and sizes. And WordPress, trying to be helpful, crops them into your usual format — which totally ruins the visuals. Here’s the fix: instead of touching the main template, we’ll make a separate one. A simple copy where featured images show up as they are, no cropping. Fonts, layout, spacing — all of that stays the same.

Step 1. Make a Test Page

First, go to your WordPress admin and create a draft page or post. This is just for testing. Call it whatever you like and add any content — the important thing is to upload a featured image (the kind that usually gets cropped). Publish the page and open it in your browser. If the image is cropped, great — it means the current template is doing its usual thing and we’re ready to make changes.

Step 2. Duplicate the Template File

Next, access your site files — either through your hosting panel, via SFTP, or a file manager. Go to:
wp-content → themes → [your active theme] → templates

If you’re not sure which theme is active, you can check under Appearance → Themes in the dashboard.

Find the file called single.html — this controls how individual posts look. Make a copy of it and rename it something like no-resize.html.

Open your new file in a code editor and look for the line that outputs the featured image. It’ll look something like this:

<!-- wp:post-featured-image {"aspectRatio":"3/2"} /-->

That aspectRatio bit is what forces the image into a set shape. To stop WordPress from cropping, just remove that part so it looks like:

<!-- wp:post-featured-image {} /-->

Save the file. That’s it — now you’ve got a version of your template that shows images in full.

Step 3. Use Your New Template

Back in the WordPress admin, open your test page again. On the right side, find the Template section. It’s probably set to something like “Default.”
Click it and choose your new template (e.g. no-resize). Save and refresh the page. If everything worked, your image should now display uncropped — just as it was uploaded.

What If Your Styles Come From a Separate CSS File?

No worries. If your page styling depends on an external CSS file, you can either:

→ Make a copy of it (call it something like style-no-resize.css) and link it in your new template,
→ Or tweak just the CSS for featured images, so they behave differently — without touching the rest of the layout.

That’s it! You didn’t mess with your main template, you didn’t break the design, and you didn’t have to write a bunch of custom code. Now you’ve got a clean, custom template for those quirky new sections — and your images finally look just right.