Creating a New Page/Post Template

I’ve been tasked with making some improvements on a website, but my experience is woefully and hilariously out of date. 🙂

It’s a football site which generally has very steady traffic and it copes fine. However when it gets to match day, the visitors spike and the site slows to a crawl which means things like recent posts plugins etc need to be disabled.

What I thought I’d try and accomplish is create a template for match day comment threads which doesn’t include other code other than the header, top menu, post saying which match it is and the comments software underneath.

However, the site was developed by someone else I can’t get hold of, and there are a lot of options in WordPress which are confusing.

The site does have it’s own Child theme based on Atelier, but it’s used as a subscription site rather than a shop.

So, where do I start to create a light page that can purely be used for these higher-traffic situations?

I also wanted to reduce the number of blog posts on the home page to get it to load quicker (I think they’re served as ‘products’), but I cannot for the life of me find the code that works for it. I’ve checked in the Customizer, Editor, Appearance settings, Reading in Options, the Theme options, even tried some code in functions but cannot find it!

These may be silly questions, but we all start somewhere. 😀