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How to Make a Static Wordpress Page your Site's Homepage - Made Easy
Create a Static Page for your Wordpress Homepage
Wordpress is a wonderfully easy tool to use to create an integrated website and blog that can be updated by non-programmers and accessed for updates, comments and new content from any web-browser. The beauty of Wordpress is the ability to create both static pages and blog posts (which "scroll" off the top of the page as new content is added.)
The default Wordpress setting is to the have the "Home" page of the site be the main blog page, this means that as new content is posted, the old content will "scroll" off and be archived. But what if you want the homepage of your site to be a static page that doesn't change? This hub will cover the steps to make that happen.
Create a Static Home Page on Wordpress
The first step is to create a page called Home for your site's homepage. So, from the Wordpress Dashboard, choose Pages > Add New.
Make the Title of the page "Home" and add your content. Click Publish. This creates the Static Home page content, but it also adds a second link called Home on your main site navigation.
Create a Blog Page for your Wordpress Posts
So, now the next step is to remove the double "Home" page links and use one of the pages as the site's blog. Wordpress needs to have a place on the site for "Posts" to go if you are going to use the blog aspect of the software at all.
You need to create a page on the site that will be used at the "shell" page for the blog. You won't add any content to this page, but just create it and use it for a later setting change to let Wordpress know where your blog posts should go.
Go to Pages > Add New and create a page with whatever title you'd like your blog to have, eg. Blog.
Remove the Duplicate Home Link
Ok, now you've got your static home page, a blog page for your posts and all that's left is to change the settings to let Wordpress know what page should be used for the front page of the site and where blog posts should go.
Go to Settings > Reading and change the "Front Page Displays" from "Your Latest Posts" to be a static page, then from the drop down menus, choose the page to be used as the home page and the page to be used for blog posts.
Now when you view your site, you will see only one Home page link and an additional link for the blog that will be used as you add new posts to your site.
Now you have a static home page, a blog page and any additional static pages you've added to your site. Simple, right?
In another Hub I will cover an easy way to change the order of your static page links (Wordpress defaults to alphabetical listings)