A good thing about using the WordPress over other blogging platform such as Blogger is that it allows you to customize your WordPress website the way you want. One such customization option is the ability to set a static front page in WordPress. A Static front page is different from your normal blog like home page that shows recent posts. A static homepage in WordPress allows you to create a more traditional looking website. Static home page in WordPress is useful for those who wants to display the same page every time whenever someone visits their website’s home page. It’s more of a landing page, where you can display your services, testimonials, etc. I wanted to set a static front page for one my WordPress blog which deals with a specific niche and also has the matching domain name. So, everyone who visits that blog is looking for only one thing that is offered by the blog. So, it makes sense that I rather have a static front page showing the main content of the website rather than showing recent blog posts. A Static front page would also come in handy if you are a web developer offering web designing services, or if you have coupon website or an e-commerce website, etc. Fortunately, setting up a static front page in WordPress isn’t a big deal, and you can do it in few minutes. To make things a bit easier for you, here I have a step by step guide showing how to set a static front page in WordPress. Step 1: Create and Publish a New Page The first thing we need to do is a create a new page with a name. You may give any name to it. Let’s call it Home for this tutorial. So Login to WordPress admin panel. Click on Page (left side) and select Add New (Page). Enter a name (title) for your page. I will be using Home. Scroll down to the content area and enter whatever you have planned to show on your static front page. If you are planning to add and customize the page later, then leave it. Click the Publish button at the right side. It is necessary that you publish the page before proceeding with other steps. Sep 2: Set Static Front Page in WordPress Now that you have created a new page titled Home, it’s time to set it as a front page of your blog. So, that whenever someone visit’s your home page that is example.com, they will see your static front page instead of recent blog posts. From your WordPress dashboard, click on Settings and then open Reading option. Under Front page displays, select A Static page (select below). Click the drop-down menu to Front page: and select your newly created page (Home in this case). Scroll down and click on Save Changes to apply the changes to your WordPress site. That’s it! You have successfully set a static front page in WordPress. To check it, go to your website’s home and you should see the new home page set as the static front page. If for any reason, you don’t see the changes, then make sure that you have followed all the steps clearly. Also, delete your cached data if you have cache plugin enabled. I want to show recent posts as well. How to do it? If you also want to show the recent blogs posts, then you can do it by creating a new page and setting it as a page to show recent posts. Login to your WordPress admin dashboard. Click Page and select Add New. Name the page as Blog and publish it. Now go to Settings (left side), and open Reading settings. Click the Drop down menu under Posts page, and select your new Blog page. You can further customize it by choosing how many blog posts you want to show on a single page, and also, select whether you want to display a summary of the blog post or full text. Click on Save Changes at the bottom to apply the changes. Create Custom Menu If you visit your website’s homepage, you may notice that, even though you can view the newly created static front page, you cannot find the Blog and Home links in the site menu. To display links to Home and Blog, you have to create a Custom Menu. To create a custom menu, login to your WordPress admin dashboard. From the left side, click on Appearance and then select Menus. It will open a Menu settings page. From Select a menu to edit: click the drop-down button and select Main Menu. Click the Select button to select it for editing. Note: If you don’t see any option under Select a Menu to edit, click on Create a new menu link and Create a new Menu named as Main Menu. Now from the Left side, expand Pages by clicking on it. Click View All tab and then select Home and Blog pages or anything you named them earlier. Once selected, click on Add to Menu button. You will see that both Home and Blog pages now appear under Menu Structure (right side). Click on Save Menu button and you are done. That’s it. You have successfully created a new custom Menu and added pages to the Main menu.
