The homepage is the most visited page and the first page that your visitors will see when landing on your website.
By default, WordPress will display your recent blog posts as your homepage, but we can change it if we desired.
In this article, you will learn how to set a homepage in WordPress websites.
Create a Homepage
A fresh installation of WordPress comes with a sample page and a sample post.
The homepage is set to display the latest posts and therefore your website will show the sample post on the homepage.
To change that, we first need to create a new page and then set it up to be the home page.
First, navigate to the Pages tab and click on Add New.
Now, name the page Home and click publish.
You can also enter content with the Gutenberg blocks or skip it for now and build your website with a page builder.
If you would like to run a blog on your website, repeat the process, create another page, and call it Blog.
After creating both pages, go back to the Pages screen and make sure both pages were added successfully.
Feel free to delete the sample page and keep the home page and the blog page.
After both pages were published, we can move forward and set the homepage.
Set a Homepage in WordPress
There are two ways to set the homepage in WordPress from two different screens.
- The customization screen
- The settings screen
Set a homepage from the customization screen
In order to change the default homepage, we will need to access the customization screen.
Step #1: Open the Customize screen
The first step is to click on the Customize link from the admin bar.
Step #2: Homepage settings
Inside the customization screen, click on the Homepage Settings tab.
Step #3: Set the homepage
The last step is to change and set the homepage to be the custom page we created.
Change the option from Your latest posts to A static page and set the Homepage field to the Home page we created and the Posts page to the Blog page (optional).
After setting up the new page as your website homepage, you can see the homepage changing immediately on the right and showing the selected page.
When done click on publish and make the changes are public.
Set a homepage from the settings screen
The second way to set a WordPress homepage is from the Settings screen.
The process is very similar to the one above but can be accessed from a different screen.
To access the relevant setting screen, navigate to Settings -> Reading.
Here, change the Homepage Displays to A static page and set the homepage to the new page we created and the Posts page to the Post page we’ve created.
When done, click on Save Changes and revisit your website to make sure the new homepage is displaying.
Setting up a blog page is not mandatory but recommended if you are planning on publishing blog posts on your website.
Conclusion
In this article, you learned how to change the homepage of your WordPress website and set it to a custom page.
Feel free to watch the video at the top of this article and let us know by leaving a comment down below which method you used.
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