Someone visits your domain and lands on a list of blog posts instead of your services. Or you have built a smart new home page, and WordPress keeps showing the old one. Or the “Blog” link in your menu goes to an empty page with a heading and nothing under it.
All three come down to one setting. To set the homepage in WordPress you tell it which page to show at your main address and, if you publish posts, which page should list them. The change itself takes a minute. Block themes, though, can quietly override it with a template, and that catches a lot of people out, so both kinds of theme are covered below, followed by the checks worth making afterwards.
Latest posts or a static front page?
WordPress began life as blogging software, so out of the box the front of the site shows your most recent posts. That suits a blog. It rarely suits a business, which usually wants a fixed page with an introduction, services and a way to get in touch. WordPress calls that a static front page: a normal page you choose, shown at your domain’s root address.
If you choose a static page and still publish news or articles, you also nominate a second page as the posts page, where the list of posts will appear instead. If the difference between pages and posts is still hazy, our post on when to use a page and when to use a post clears it up.
What to check before you change anything
- The page exists and is published. Only published pages appear in the dropdowns. A draft will not show up.
- You have an empty page for posts, if you need one. Create a page called Blog, News or Articles and leave its content empty. Whatever you write on it will be ignored, as explained below.
- Your account is an Administrator. Editors cannot change Reading settings.
- You know what your theme is. Block themes can override the setting with a template, which matters in the last step.
How to set the homepage in WordPress
The main route is the same in every theme.
- Go to Settings → Reading.
- At Your homepage displays, select A static page (select below).
- In the Homepage dropdown, pick the page you want visitors to see first.
- In the Posts page dropdown, pick your empty Blog or News page, or leave it on “— Select —” if you do not publish posts.
- Press Save Changes.
WordPress warns you if you pick the same page for both, or if either one is your privacy policy page. Neither combination works.
To check it worked, go to Pages. The page you chose now shows “— Front Page” after its title in the list, and the posts page shows “— Posts Page”.
The Customizer route on classic themes
On a classic theme, the same two dropdowns sit under Appearance → Customize → Homepage Settings. The advantage is the live preview on the right, so you can see the result before pressing Publish. It saves to the same setting, so use whichever you prefer.
The Site Editor’s page list
Recent versions of WordPress also let you set a page as the homepage from the list of pages in the Site Editor, through the actions menu beside each page. Settings → Reading remains the route that works everywhere.
Block themes: when a template wins
A block theme decides how each kind of page looks using templates, which you can see under Appearance → Editor → Templates. Two of them matter here:
- Front Page: if your theme has this template, WordPress uses it for your home address whatever you chose in Settings → Reading. If the template has its own fixed layout and no block that shows your page’s content, your carefully edited page will never appear there.
- Blog Home: the template for the list of latest posts, whether at the front of the site or on your posts page.
So if you set a static page and the home page still shows something else, open Templates and look for a Front Page template. You have two sensible options. Edit that template so it contains a Post Content block, which pulls in your chosen page’s content. Or, if the theme allows it, delete or reset your customised version, then check what the theme falls back to. Do this carefully and preferably on a staging copy, because templates affect the whole site. Our post on working with templates and template parts in the Site Editor explains how to edit and reset them safely.
Classic themes can do something similar with a front-page template file in the theme’s code, and some show a hard-coded design no matter what you choose. If your theme has a “homepage” or “front page” section in its own options panel, look there too.
When the home page is built in a page builder
If your new home page was designed in Elementor, Divi or a similar builder, nothing changes about the method. The builder page is still an ordinary WordPress page, so you select it in the Homepage dropdown like any other. Builders often let you hide the theme’s header, footer or title for that page; those choices live in the builder’s page settings, not in WordPress’s Reading screen.
To change the content or layout of the page itself, see our guide to editing a page in WordPress. That job is separate from choosing which page sits at the front.
After you save: three quick checks
- Open your domain in a private window. If the old page still appears, a cache is probably serving it. Clear your caching plugin, host cache or CDN, then try again. If that does not help, our post on why changes do not show on your site lists the other usual causes.
- Click your menu’s Home and Blog links. Menus store links to specific pages, so an old Home item may still point to the page that used to be your front page.
- Look at the posts page. If you publish posts, they should now be listed there. If it is empty, check that at least one post is published.
Undoing it, and mistakes to avoid
Nothing in this setting deletes content. To go back, return to Settings → Reading and pick the previous page, or choose Your latest posts again. Your pages stay exactly as they were.
The mistakes that cause trouble are small ones:
- Writing an introduction on the posts page and wondering why it never shows. WordPress replaces that page’s content with the post list. Put any introduction in the Blog Home template, or your theme’s equivalent.
- Choosing a page that is password-protected or set to private, which hides your home page from the public.
- Leaving the old home page published and linked, so two pages compete to be your main introduction. Unpublish it or redirect it once the new one is live.
- Testing while logged in. Logged-in views often bypass the cache, so you see the change while visitors do not.
This is one of the settings worth knowing early in managing your WordPress site, alongside the others covered in our guide to the WordPress dashboard and its menus.
Frequently asked questions
Does the page I choose keep its own address?
The page still has its own slug, but once it is the front page WordPress links to it at your main domain, and visiting its old address normally redirects visitors there. Search engines will treat your root address as the home page. If the page was previously at a different address that had links pointing to it, check those links still land somewhere sensible.
Why does my blog page show the wrong heading or no posts?
When a page is set as the posts page, WordPress ignores its content and shows the post list using your theme’s blog template. The heading and layout come from that template, not from the page. If no posts appear at all, make sure at least one post is published rather than saved as a draft or scheduled.
Can I have a static homepage without a blog?
Yes. Choose A static page, pick your home page, and leave the Posts page dropdown on Select. WordPress will still let you publish posts, and they will have their own addresses and appear in category archives, but there will be no single page listing them. Many service businesses run their sites this way.
What happens to my old homepage after I switch?
Nothing is deleted. The old page becomes an ordinary page at its own address, still published unless you change that. Decide whether to keep it, set it to draft, or delete it and redirect its address, and check your menus so they no longer point visitors to the outdated version.
Sometimes the setting is right, the template looks right, and the wrong page still sits at the front because of a theme option or plugin nobody remembers adding. If you get to that point, our WordPress support service is there for exactly this sort of question.
Next in this series: WordPress Permalink Settings: Choosing a Structure
