WordPress child theme, creating a custom php template page

When you create a template page, it does not create a WordPress URL for it. So for example, if you create a PHP file called contact-content.php it doesn’t generate example.com/contact/.

If you don’t want to manually create a page and assign a Page Template to it (which by the way would normally be named something like tpl-content.php – the PHP comments are what designate it to be a Page Template you can select in the editor), you can add code in your child theme so that upon activation, it automatically creates a Page with whatever slug you want. If it’s just your site, you’ll know your permalink structure so you can be sure the URL will be what you wish. If it’s something you’re applying to many sites with different settings, you may still face the issue of different styles of permalinks – i.e. example.com?p=123 versus example.com/contact/.