How to Create Homepage in WordPress: A Beginner’s Guide

So you got your hands on that perfect WordPress theme, and are all set to build your website. But, after you install the theme and get a first look at the website. It’s not even close to what you imagined! It’s disappointing. WordPress is a Content Management System (CMS), and if you are a beginner, not used to its interface, then you might struggle a bit.  Now, such a situation may arise in two scenarios. Either, you may have too little content. But, that can be taken care of by adding content to your website. Or, you haven’t created the homepage yet. So, how to create homepage in WordPress? Almost every WordPress themes come with custom homepage feature. However, even if it doesn’t, you can create a custom homepage using WordPress. So, in this article, we will look into the methods by which you can do it quickly and smoothly.

Creating a homepage using WordPress is not a difficult task. WordPress, being an extremely user-friendly platform, gives an easy interface to create and manage websites. However, easy as it is, you need to know the exact procedure to create a homepage in WordPress. You might just get lost among the hundreds of customization functionalities of WordPress.

Types of WordPress Homepage

The homepage is often key for retraining traffic to your website. So, you need to decide on a good design for it.

There are two ways of adding content to WordPress. One is posts, and second is pages. Posts are entries in your blog that get published in a chronological manner. Pages, on the other hand, are meant for static content.

WordPress, by default, displays the blog posts that you publish, on the homepage of your website. It follows a reverse chronological order in doing that. Meaning, the most recent posts displayed first, followed by the older ones. If you run a news website or an e-magazine, then it’s okay. However, if you are planning on a company website or even an e-commerce site, then this is not ideal. In place, you can opt for a static homepage where you can introduce your business to the visitors.

Such pages are static, meaning, you don’t add to those pages. Though changes can be done, and we will come to that in later, but, in essence, these pages are static and made for providing information. For example, the ‘About Us’ page of the website doesn’t usually change. The homepage is a static page and you need to know how to create homepage in WordPress to get started.

How to Create Homepage in WordPress?

Creating a WordPress static homepage requires you to follow certain steps. Here, we are going to discuss them in detail to help you easily build the homepage and fire up your site in no time.

Step 1: How to Create a Static Page Homepage on WordPress

The first step is to build a static page that we will later set to the homepage. The steps for doing that are:

1. First, log in to the WordPress dashboard as admin.
2. Next, click on ‘Pages’ and then select ‘Add New’
3. Now, create the content and title for your WordPress homepage. This will be the page that will be set to the homepage. So, add content accordingly.
4. Review and proofread the content
5. Next, click on Publish.

Step 2: Create a Blog Page

The page that we created above is to be set as the homepage. So, you need a page where you can publish your blogs. So, this is the second step.

1. First, click on ‘Pages’ and then on ‘New’
2. Then, set the page title to Blogs, Posts, whatever you like and click on Publish to publish the page. Do not worry about the content as you can always add that later.

It will not be out of place to mention that this step is but optional. If you want only static pages for your site, then you are welcome to skip this step. However, if you decide on publishing blogs in the future, you can use these guidelines then. Now comes the final step of how to create homepage in WordPress.

Step 3: Set the Static Front Page

This is the final and the most crucial step where we will set the page that we built on step 1 as the homepage, And also, we will set the Blog page that we built in step 2, to display the blog posts.

1. First, click on Settings> Reading.
2. Now, you will find an option reading ‘Your Homepage Displays.’ Set it to A static page.
3. Next, select the page that we created in the first step as the homepage.
4. Now, select the blog page we created in the second step as the Posts page.
5. Click on Save.

So, this is all about how to create homepage in WordPress. But what if you want to change the homepage? Well, it’s simple. Just create a page and set it to the homepage as mentioned in step 2. This will make the new page your homepage.

Now, as we all know that websites have a typical Home button that directs to the homepage of the website. So, what happens when you change the homepage. Do you need to change the link as well? In one word, the answer will be NO. But that requires that you add a home link to the menu, as we will discuss now.

Adding Home Link to the Menu

Adding the home link to the menu will make sure that the Home button always directs to the homepage, no matter which page you set as the homepage.

1. First, Open your WordPress administrator dashboard and go to Appearance> Menus.
2. Select the View All tab from the Pages box.
3. Click on the checkbox next to Home.
4. Next, click Add to Menu.
5. Now, click on the Save Menu.

So, this is how to create homepage in WordPress and how to add the Home link.

Wrapping it up

WordPress is a very user-friendly CMS and creating both static and blog pages are not at all a difficult task. However, you must know how to create homepage in WordPress. This is what this article has tried to answer. And hopefully, after going through it you have gained the complete knowledge for creating a homepage for your WordPress site.