How to Create a Static Front Page For Your Blog

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.

About Static Front Pages

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.

As this is a common ‘how do you’ question in the Edublogs forum, which can be tricky, I’ve decided to write detailed instructions. Yes, I’ve used screenshots of the latest version of WordPress MU since Edublogs is upgrading soon. The method is the same regardless of version.

Please remember this isn’t necessarily your best option. Take the time to first learn more about:

  1. Differences Between Blog Pages and Posts
  2. Differences Between Tags and Categories

How To Create a Static Home Page

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.

However with some themes you end up with two Home links. This happens because many themes are hard coded to display “Home” link even when there are no other pages on the blog.

To remove the second Home link you just edit the Home page to make it a sub page of another page.

How Make Sub Pages

1. Go to Pages > Edit

2. Hover over Title Home to bring up action links and click on Edit

3. In the attribute module change the page from being a main page (parent) to be locating under another page (its parent page) and click Update Page. In the example below the home page is now located under the About page.

Tip: If you’re planning to delete the About page you would locate it under the post page.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Can you share a link to your blog If you use a static homepage so others see how you are using it? Can you also explain why you have chosen this approach as opposed to a front post page?

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16 thoughts on “How to Create a Static Front Page For Your Blog

  1. is it possible to get a static page on blogspot? how to do so? is there any way in blogspot to publish the comments on the front like showing comments under “latest comment” ?? please let me know, in my blog i hv lots or readers comment but i cant bring thm in the front 🙁 . have a look at http://bangla-choti-online.blogspot.com

    1. @ranga, Blogger doesn’t support the use of pages so it is considerably more tricky. What you have to do is use Posts and then install a template that links to the posts like you would with Pages.

      However, it is quite normal on a blog for a reader to have to click on the link to read the comments.

  2. I tested this out for a teacher who wanted to post homework on a page called assignments and wanted a newsletter style front page that would be updated monthly, but now I can’t get my Home link to go back to my main page. I created a Home page and an Assignments page, making all posts go to the Assignments page and using Home as a static page. I don’t want to keep it that way, but my Pages link to Home wouldn’t go to the main page of my blog. Can I reset this or am I now stuck with a static first page onto which I can send my blog posts?

  3. Thanks for the tip on the two home pages. I’ve been racking my brain on how to fix that issue. The only problem I can see is if you have the pages site map in a sidebar. The Home page will show under About. It’s not too much of a big deal but it might look a bit odd since, typically, Home is located at the top of any site map.

    I’ll have to try this out in my next post in the ePortfolio series I’m working on.

    Thanks again!

    1. @April Hayman, Actually you can change the order of the pages in the page widget I just didn’t have time to explain how 🙂 – what out on the Help site. When I get to that section I will explain the how.

  4. (Not sure if my prev. comment posted)
    Do you have similar directions for blogger? I was considering reorganizing my blog, and would like to possibly create a home page.

    1. @Cassy, Sorry Cassy I’ve had to use some comment moderation as my blog has been targeted by spammers which has been annoying. This is why unfortunately your comment didn’t post immediately. I’m moderating specific words so one of your words must be on my moderate list.

      Unfortunately the challenge you face with blogger is that it doesn’t have the page and post structure that you have on blogs powered with WordPress. So to achieve similar what bloggers on Blogger do is trick their blog into thinking their posts are pages – which isn’t necessarily a great approach.

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