If you’ve recently finished designing a homepage for your WordPress website, it would be easy to think that you simply hit the “Publish” button and the new page would display as your homepage when a user lands on your main website URL (www.example.com).
However, without you telling WordPress that this is what you want users to see when they first land on your site, WordPress essentially doesn’t know what to display as your main homepage other than a feed of your latest blog posts (this is the default setting for every WordPress site). In other words, you have to tell WordPress that rather than displaying a dynamic “Latest Posts” page as your homepage, you want it to display a traditional, static “Home” page.
In this tutorial, I’ll be showing you how to set a static homepage in WordPress 6.0 or newer.
1. Publish Your Home Page
For starters, make sure the page you want to set as your homepage is published. When you hit “Publish” from inside the Block Editor (red arrow in the image above), the home page will be located at whatever your site URL is with the slug “/home” (assuming you titled the page “Home” when you created it).
For example, in my case it’s at “whirlybirdphoto.com/home” (outlined in green in the image above). It’s treating the home page as a separate page.
2. Navigate to Your Settings
To set the “Home” page we designed as the front page of our website, I’ll return to the WordPress admin area by clicking the WordPress logo in the upper left corner of the Block Editor (red arrow in the image above).
3. Set Your Static Home Page
Then, using the main navigation, I’ll go to Settings>Reading (red arrow in the image above).
At the very top you’ll see it says “Your homepage displays” followed by two radio buttons. Select the “A static page” option (outlined in green in the above photo).
Two dropdowns will now appear. For “Homepage,” select the page you just created for your home page (red arrow in the image above). You do not need to select the “Posts” page right now. Click “Save changes” (yellow arrow).
Now, when you type just your main URL – like WhirlyBirdPhoto.com – your home page design will pop up.
That’s it for this tutorial! Don’t forget to check out my full WordPress 6.0 for Non-Coders course to go from a beginner to pro in web design.
