What is an alternative to get_page_by_title()?

I’m coding a theme where I want to display information in the footer that’s only available on a template page. I have been using get_page_by_title() which works well if you know what the page will be called, but in my opinion it’s not very dynamic, it’s impossible to predict what a user will name a page in your theme.

In my research I found a function called get_all_page_ids() which returns a numerically indexed array of ids from the site. This function would be a lot cooler if it was an associative (or even a post object), but I digress.

I have considered using something like this:

$all_page_ids = get_all_page_ids();

foreach ($all_page_ids as $id) {
    // get_post() {@link https://developer.wordpress.org/reference/functions/get_post/}
    $post_object = get_post($id);

    // preg_match() {@link http://php.net/manual/en/function.preg-match.php}
    if(preg_match("/\b(contact)\b/i", $post_object->post_title)) {
        // do something here
    } else {
        // for readability
        continue;
    }
}

However, this still creates the problem of having to know that the user chose to have the word contact in their title. What if they created a page called “Get in Touch” that is their contact page? This would break.

So, in short, my question revolves around best practice for theme designers. Is get_page_by_title() the best way to get another page’s ID, or is there a way to combine a few functions/variables to get another page’s ID without knowing the title?

Or are there WordPress functions that do this kind of heavy lifting or is get_page_by_title() the only close one? My suspicion is there’s a hackier, but better way to do this, I just don’t have any ideas. Thanks for any help you’re able to give on this.

If you don’t force a title, and obviously do not know the id, the only way you can do it is by letting the user select which page to use, usually done in the theme’s options page, but can be done in the costumizer, or even as part of page editing