Typically, most web sites have an initial page that acts as the virtual “reception desk” of your business and greets everyone who arrives on your website or blog via the front door.
The front page of your website is important, because it is generally the first thing a visitor sees when they arrive on your site if they type in your domain name on their web browser, or navigate to your website from a search engine or directory listing.
The front page can also serve as a landing page to catch your visitors’ attention, provide information to visitors about who you are, what you do and also to help them find their way to important areas on the website.
In a static website, the home page and its content are normally “fixed” to a specific home page file (e.g. www.mywebsite.com/index.php), so if you want your visitors to see different content on the home page when they arrive on your site via the main URL (i.e. www.mywebsite.com), you would normally have to edit the content of the page itself, or log into your server and change file names.
WordPress makes things easier for website owners, especially for site owners don’t want to mess around with stuff like editing page code in server files.
Used right “out of the box”, WordPress acts as a “blog” and presents a changing list of recently-published posts, with the headlines and first paragraph or two of the content visible for each article published, and links pointing to separate pages where visitors can then continue see the full article (e.g. “read more” …).
With WordPress, however, you are given the flexibility of creating as many pages as you want and then specifying which of these pages you want designated as being the static page of your website or blog.
As you will soon discover, you can also replace the home page of your website as often as you like, without touching the content, simply by creating a number of pages you can point to as the site’s home page, and then selecting the page you want to show as the home page of your site.
This feature can be used in many different ways. For example, you may want visitors arriving on your site to:
- Read a sales letter
- See a “splash” page before navigating to the rest of your site
- Promote a new “book of the month” each month, or “product of the month”
- Promote seasonal offers (e.g. a “Valentine” themed offer as Valentine’s Day approaches)
- View different sections of your e-commerce catalog at regularly-spaced intervals (e.g. daily), or special occasions (e.g. sports events in your region)
- View information on “split-test” sales pages (create two or more sales pages with similar content to test different page elements, e.g. headlines, scarcity offers, different layout, etc., then display one version on the home page for a certain period of time and then replace with the other version for the same period of time to see which page converts better)
- Or even land on a “pre-launch” page if your site hasn’t officially launched yet!
Learn how to set any page on your website or blog as your home page.
How To Set Any Page In WordPress As The Static Home Page: Step-By-Step Tutorial
To set any page in your site to display as the Home Page, go to your admin menu and select Settings > Reading …
In the Reading Settings screen, do the following:
- Front page displays: select “A static page …”
- Front page: Click on the drop down menu and choose the page you want to set as your Home Page (you can choose any page listed in your dropdown menu)
Click Save Changes when done to update the settings and set your new home page …
After saving, click on Visit Site (tip: right-click and select “Open Link In New Tab” to open the homepage in a new browser window without leaving your WP dashboard) …
The page you have specified in Front page displays > A static page should display as your site’s home page …
You can change the home page for your site as many times as you like, just by repeating the above process and selecting another page from the dropdown menu …
The newly-selected page will be immediately assigned to be the new home page of your site …
When you select any page as the homepage of your site, WordPress reassigns the domain root to the URL of the page.
What this means is that if you select the page with the following URL your home page:
http://yourdomain.com/player-registration
The above page will be assigned the following URL for as long as it remains the site’s home page:
http://yourdomain.com/
Notes:
If you type the “old” URL of the page you have now specified as the new home page into your web browser, WordPress will direct you to the home page.
Also, if you choose another page to be the static home page, WordPress reassigns your old home page back to its original URL …
Congratulations! Now you know how to display a WordPress page as the home page of your web site.
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View the video version: Video Tutorial – Create a Static Front Page
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