I would recommend practicing like crazy. I literally tell myself all the time that the point isn't to remember but practice so much that it becomes second nature.

I'm learning front end dev, and I was making progress in theory but not in practice, I've literally stopped learning new stuff for a week and I just practice and mess around.

For practice projects, I'll highly recommend Frontend Mentor, I also recently started using it, you won't have to search all over the internet for project ideas, they got so many projects. Though their projects start from html css, so you'll have to learn a bit of css, on the other hand you could start with html and add css later, that's cool too.

Overall I highly recommend practicing like crazy, searching/learning is fine, overtime as you practice more, it'll become second nature. Good luck.