WordPress was originally designed for blogging, but it has grown into an amazing website building tool for all types of sites. Most WordPress sites are set up with the blog post feed on the home page. But if you want to create a different front page for your site, that’s possible and we’ll show you how, right here!
Choosing a Homepage Style
Blog posts are unique because they publish to a feed, called a blog, on your website. This feature makes it super easy to write and publish content on the web, without having to create a new page with new formatting each time. And it enables you to have all your articles organized in one place by the date they were published.
If you want to learn more, check out our article on the difference between posts and pages in WordPress.
Because many WordPress themes default to having a blog feed on the homepage, you may want to learn to change that.
The MOJO blog website features a blog feed on the homepage. This is what most bloggers want.
But let’s say you’re creating a business site, or a personal portfolio. You may want to remove the blog feed from your homepage, or get rid of the blog altogether.
Maybe you want something like this homepage from the Birch WordPress theme demo. If you’re not blogging, or the blog is not the main focus of your site, you’ll need to be able to change the basic WordPress setup.
Setting Your WordPress Homepage to a Static Page
The first, and easiest way to eliminate the blog post feed from your front page is to set a static page to your home url.
1. Login to your WordPress admin dashboard by typing yourdomain.com/wp-admin into your browser. Need help logging in?
2. From the left sidebar in your dashboard, choose Settings and Reading from the pop-out menu.
3. In the Reading Settings, choose between a homepage that displays your latest posts or a static page (meaning a page that doesn’t display a feed of blog posts) by clicking one of these buttons.
4. Now, you’ll need to pick a page to be your front page (a.k.a. your homepage, or the page that you first land on when you enter your url). Choose an existing page from the dropdown next to Front page: to set your new homepage.
You will have to create your new homepage before you can set it here. To do this, check out our post on creating pages in WordPress.
5. Next, you can designate a separate page for your blog posts, by choosing a page from the Posts page: dropdown menu. Or, if you don’t plan to blog, you can remove the blog feed entirely by choosing the — Select — option from the same dropdown menu.
Again, you will need to create a page to designate as the posts page, just like you did for the homepage.
For your posts, you could simply create a blank page titled Blog and link to that in your navigation menu.
Changing your front page to a static page is that simple.
Hiding Specific Blog Posts
But what if you keep your blog, and you want to hide a specific post? You can do that too, without hiding all your posts as we showed above.
In your post editor, you’ll find a Visibility setting in the Publish box to the right of the editor. Click edit next to Visibility, and you can choose to set your post to Public, Password protected, or Private.
By choosing Private, your post will be hidden from the public. Only you and other admin users on your blog will be able to view it.
Another option is Password protected, which will prompt the reader to enter a password you set before they can read your content.
However, you may be looking to monetize your content. In other words, if you want to require a paid membership to view your articles, you can do that with a WordPress plugin like MemberPress.
Refer back to this post when you need to reconfigure your homepage, posts page, or hide a post from public view. See our other articles below for more WordPress help.
