How to Edit the Home Page in WordPress
Posted onOn its own, the WordPress home page displays all of your latest posts in reverse chronological order. If you’re using WordPress as a dedicated blog, this is exactly what you want. After all, you want your readers to view your latest posts as soon as they land. But with WordPress being used as a Content Management System or CMS even for business and enterprise sites, you need to know how to edit the home page so that it displays the content of your choice instead of changing all the time. Fortunately, this is an easy tweak and WordPress has inbuilt functionality to enable this. You can also designate a separate area for your latest posts if you want. This allows you to create a real fully functional website with an integrated blog. Let’s see how to go about it.
Creating and Displaying Your Custom Page
The first thing to do is to go to the WordPress administration dashboard and click “Pages” on the left-hand side and choose “Add New” from the drop-down menu. This will take you to the interface where you can create the page that you want to display as your new homepage.
In this test example, I’ve merely put in some filter content for purposes of demonstration. Input all the relevant details like the title etc. to get the look and feel that you want. Save this page and you’re done. Now we only have to enable the setting that will display this as the home page instead of the reverse chronological posts.
To do this, while still within the WordPress administration screens, click the “Settings” menu option on the bottom left and select “Reading” from the resulting drop-down menu.
Over here, you can see that the very first option allows you to determine what users see when they visit your blog for the first time. By default, the “latest posts” option is selected that modifies your homepage every time you make a new post by putting the latest entry at the very top. Instead of that, choose the second option allowing us to select a “static page” instead. When you do this, the drop-down boxes are enabled and as shown in the screenshot below, select the page that we just created and saved from the drop-down menu.
Scroll all the way to the bottom and save your settings. The next time you visit your blog homepage, you will see the newly created page instead of the latest posts.
Separate Page for Blog Posts
But what about our new blog posts? How will users see them if they’re not visible on the front? Unless you specifically assign them to yet another page, they will only be visible via a category or archive section or through a direct URL. Chances are that you want them to be displayed separately on a new page – perhaps one called “Blog” for example.
This too is easy. Repeat the process above for creating a new page and give it a title and URL slug of your choice. Something like “blog”, would be ideal so that the page would be reachable at www.example.com/blog. After saving this page, head back to the “Reading” section and this time, select your newly created page from the second drop-down box called “Posts Page” as shown below.
Now all of your recent posts are visible on the selected page. You can see below that this is indeed the case.
A set up like this is perfect for enterprise websites that require static page displays but also want to have a blog integrated into their site. By creating a custom front page and relegating the blog homepage to a separate section, they can have the best of both worlds.
Seriously this just saved me a trip to the ER. I screwed something up on my site and I panicked. I could not figure out how to get my front page back instead of the freaking latest posts page. I did a Google search and it gave me so much crap. I kept sifting through and I finally found your blog. Thank you so much!
You’re most welcome :)
that was super helpful!
I cannot thank you enough for your clear instructions on this matter. My website and blog are coming along nicely. I look forward to its launch soon.
You genuinely saved me from insanity.
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