I often come across people and clients who would like to build their custom login, registration, and lost password form in WordPress instead of using the…

Zoie Carnegie

March 01, 2016

I often come across people and clients who would like to build their custom login, registration, and lost password form in WordPress instead of using the default wp-login.php page. It’s probably because it’s too wordpress-y.

In this tutorial, I will demonstrate how to build a custom login form using the default functionality that wordpress gives us.

• Building a Custom Login Form
• Handling the Login Form Response

Building a WordPress Login Form (Out of the box)

This is what WordPress gives us out of the box.

There are quite a few different options available to make a custom login page. You can build a shortcode so that you could simply put [wp-login] or something you like on any page/post, make a page theme file and use that page to attach to a post/page, a widget could be a good solution too, or maybe you’d like to simply edit the existing form and add some pizzazz to it.

I am going to show you all of this tutorial using the page-theme method because it is probably the easiest to implement for beginners. This will also give you an intro into page themes, if your not familiar with it.

To start our theme, you will need to do the following:

1. Install WordPress
2. Navigate to your wp-content/themes folder and choose a theme to edit or install a new one
3. create a file called page-login.php in the theme directory
4. Next open that file with a text editor of your choosing and add the following at the top of the php file.

<?php
/*
Template Name: Login
*/

get_header(); ?>

<div id="primary" class="content-area">
<div id="content" class="site-content" role="main">

</div><!-- #content -->
</div><!-- #primary -->

<?php get_sidebar(); ?>
<?php get_footer(); ?>

#wordpress