The **`<template>`** [HTML](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML) element is a mechanism for holding HTML that is not to be rendered immediately when a page is loaded but may be instantiated subsequently during runtime using JavaScript.

Think of a template as a content fragment that is being stored for subsequent use in the document. While the parser does process the contents of the **`<template>`** element while loading the page, it does so only to ensure that those contents are valid; the element's contents are not rendered, however.