Create a Site from a Template

A template is a finished WordPress site - content, theme and plugins already set up - that we copy onto a brand-new site of your own. You get a working site in a couple of minutes instead of a blank install and an afternoon.

Templates are free on every plan.

Find the templates

Go to Sites → Create New Site. Under Choose a starting point, next to Full Site and Empty Site, there's Start from a Template - click Browse.

The gallery has a search box and category chips, and each card shows the template's name, what it's for and any tags (WooCommerce, for example).

Preview before you choose

View Demo opens the template's live demo in a window, with a desktop/mobile toggle so you can see how it behaves on a phone. Open in new tab shows it full size.

The demo is a real, running WordPress site - the same one your copy is made from. If the preview stays blank, open it in a new tab: some pages refuse to be displayed inside another page.

Create the site

Use this Template takes you back to the create form with the template already chosen, shown in a summary at the top. Change goes back to the gallery.

Fill in the rest of the form as usual - site name, domain, region - and click Create Site.

A few things are decided for you when you pick a template:

• It's always a Full Site. A template contains a WordPress install, so there is nothing to copy onto an empty one.
• Advanced Mode is off. The template brings its own theme and plugins, and its own subdomain choice would conflict with the one it was built on.
• PHP is set to the template's minimum if you had picked something older. Each template says what it needs; you can move it up later on the site's settings page.

What gets copied

Everything the demo site has:

• every page, post, menu and media file
• the theme, set up the way you saw it
• the plugins, with their settings
• the WooCommerce products, categories and settings, on a store template

What does not come across is anything that belongs to the demo rather than to your site: the demo notice bar, the search-engine block, and the demo's own email settings. Your site gets its own database prefix and its own administrator account.

Kept up to date

Right after the copy finishes, we update WordPress core, the theme and every plugin on your new site. A template published two months ago still gives you current software on the day you use it.

If an update can't run - a plugin that needs a newer PHP, say - the site still goes live and the task says which one was skipped.

Your admin login

The administrator account is yours, not the demo's. It's created with your account email, and the username and password are the same ones any new MagicWP site gets.

The quickest way in is Magic Login on the Sites list, which opens wp-admin with no password. To set an explicit password, use WordPress admin password on the site's Tools page.

After it's created

The template's content is sample content. It's there to show you the structure, not to publish:

1. Replace the text and images. Work through the pages and swap the demo copy for yours.
2. Check the menus and the front page under Appearance → Menus and Settings → Reading.
3. Update the site title and tagline under Settings → General.
4. Delete the pages you don't need. A template usually ships more than any one site uses.
5. Set up email so contact forms and order confirmations actually send - see Email.

When you're happy with it, connect your own domain. HTTPS is issued automatically.

Creating a site the usual way

Nothing changes about the other two options - Create New Site for a standard WordPress install, or Create an empty environment for a clean stack you'll migrate into.