The WordPress Template Hierarchy

A visual guide, updated for WordPress 4.8.

How to use this table

Start on the appropriate Entry Point and move along the row from left (more specific) to right (more general) to understand the template hierarchy for the page that needs to be displayed.

For the more general templates, look to the left of the cell to understand which types of pages fall back to that template if more specific ones are not implemented in your theme.

A guide to conventions
Entry Point	WordPress uses a series of checks (Conditional Tags) to decide what kind of page needs to be displayed
Variable template file name	Includes some aspect of the page to display
Constant template file name	Does not depend on any aspect of the page to display
Conditional	If a certain condition is met, the template is applied; see footnotes for explanations.
Base template	The last template in a chain, it must exist in your theme.

The WordPress 4.8 Template Hierarchy
Archive Pages	Date Archive							date.php	archive.php	index.php⁶
	Author Archive					author-`$nicename`.php	author-`$id`.php	author.php
	Tag Archive					tag-`$slug`.php¹	tag-`$term_id`.php	tag.php
	Category Archive					category-`$slug`.php¹	category-`$term_id`.php	category.php
	Custom Taxonomy Archive²				taxonomy-`$taxonomy`-`$term_slug`.php¹	taxonomy-`$taxonomy`.php		taxonomy.php
	Custom Post Type Archive					archive-`$post_type`.php
Singular Pages	Attachment Post	`$type`-`$subtype`.php³	`$subtype`.php³	`$type`.php³	attachment.php³	single-`$post_type`-`$slug`.php¹	single-`$post_type`.php	single.php	singular.php
	Single Post				Custom Page Template⁴	single-`$post_type`-`$slug`.php¹	single-`$post_type`.php	single.php
	Single Page				Custom Page Template⁴	page-`$slug`.php¹	page-`$id`.php	page.php
Other Pages	Search Results								search.php
	Missing Page								404.php
	Home Page								home.php
Front Page	Front Page	front-page.php	Home Page or Single Page⁵
Embedded Content	oEmbed Post				embed-`$post_type`-`$post_format`.php	embed-`$post_type`.php			embed.php	theme-compat/embed.php

I built this chart by looking through the WordPress source code:

template-loader.php — decides the template hierarchy based on Conditional Tags
template.php implements a variety of methods to get a template hierarchy for specific kinds of pages (archive page, singular page, etc.)

Footnotes

¹ WordPress stores the $slug in url-encoded format, with special characters encoded as %XY. For example, the thinking face emoji character (🤔) is encoded as %F0%9F%A4%94. As of version 4.7, WordPress will first try to match the decoded variant (e.g. 🤔.php), then the encoded one (e.g. %F0%9F%A4%94.php).

² The post's format is considered a custom taxonomy, whose slug is post_format, and whose terms are post-format-link, post-format-quote, etc.

³ Attachment-related templates don't follow a logic hierarchy from more specific to less specific. You can handle these in the single-attachment.php template instead.

⁴ If the page has a Custom Page Template assigned to it, that template will be used. As of version 4.7, Custom Page Templates can be applied to all types of posts, not just Pages.

⁵ The user can configure what to show on the Front Page: either the content of the Home Page, or that of a specific page in the website.

⁶ The index.php file is technically not necessary for the hierarchy (as long as you have templates to cover all cases), but you still need to have one for the theme to be valid.