Create a “Static Front Page” For Your Blog

Posted on August 1, 2009 by Sue Waters

There are a few situations where bloggers don’t want their front page (‘Home’) to display their latest post and want a static page instead.

Educators occasionally use a static home page to provide background information to parents or students about the purpose of the blog. Their Home page normally contains content that rarely changes and latest posts are viewed by clicking on the link to the Posts page.

This isn’t necessarily your best option.

Take the time to first learn more about:

Setting up a Static Front page

Creating a Static Front Page is as simple as:

1. Go to Page > Add New

2. Give the page the title Home, write the content you want displayed on the front page of your blog and click then Publish.

3. Click Page > Add New again and create a new page titled Posts.

You don’t need to add content to this page since this is the page that will display your latest posts.

4. Go to Settings > Reading

5. Change your settings to A Static page with Front page: Home and Post Page: Posts and then click Save Changes.

The front page of your blog should contains the content that your wrote for the Home page and your latest posts are viewed by clicking on the link to the Posts page.

Fixing up the links to your pages

Once you’ve set up your Static homepage you may need to:

Add a link in your top navigation to display your new Post page.
Remove an extra Home link from your top navigation (some themes you can end up with two Home links when you create a static Home page because the theme has been hard coded to display “Home” link even when there are no other pages on the blog).

The solution for both is to create a custom menu for your top navigation.

Here is how you do it:

1. Go to Appearance > Menu

2. Give your menu a name – ‘Main’ will work great!

3. Click on the ‘Create Menu‘

4. Now just select the pages you want to add to your menu then click Add To Menu.

To add your Post page you select Post.

Now create a custom link for home by adding your blog URL, the name Home and click Add To Menu.

When readers click on the Home link they will be taken to your front page.
For example the blog URL of this blog is http://help.edublogs.org
You can use custom links to link to any website — which is really handy!

Here’s what my menu now looks like:

6. Now drag/drop the menu items to change their order in your menu.

Here’s what my new order looks like:

7. Once you’ve finished changing the order click Save Menu.

8. Now to display your new top navigation on your blog you just need to select Main from under the Primary Navigation drop down menu and then click Save.