How to Create a Static Home Page in WordPress

In this guide, we’ll explain how to create a static homepage for your WordPress site. This is common practice for pretty much any website these days. Long gone are the days when most websites’ home pages contained a list of their latest blog posts.

What Is a Static WordPress Home Page

This idea of a static WordPress home page goes by some other names, including “dynamic front page” and “custom front page,” among others.

These terms all point to the same idea: rather than going with WordPress’s default of showing your most recent posts on your website’s homepage, you want to create a custom front page with content you define.

How to Create a Static Front Page

First, you’ll need to create a page that will become your home page. Here’s a quick guide on how to add a page in WordPress.

Once you created the page you want to make the home page of your website, follow these steps:

1. Open the WordPress Customizer. I do that by going to Appearance > Customize in the left sidebar of the administration area.
2. Once the Customizer opens, click on Homepage Settings to open the panel.
3. Then, select “A static page” under “Your homepage displays” label
4. In the dropdown labeled “Homepage,” select the page you want to be your new homepage
5. Click the Publish button to save the changes

The Homepage settings in WordPress are also available in the main admin menu under Settings > Reading.

You can also select (or quickly create by clicking “Add Page”) your “Blog” page to make that page the main page of your site’s blog section. That’s what WordPress means by the words “Posts page”: the page it’ll use as your blog section’s main page.

How to Create the Home Page for Your WordPress Website

With that, you’ll have set up a static front page for your WordPress site. The topic of how to build an attractive and easy-to-edit page in WordPress is beyond our scope here, but we can point you to our resources on the topic.

The default block editor is great for creating custom page designs, although some users will find that it’s not very beginner-friendly and lacks some of the common features you might want to add to your home page.

The easiest beginner-friendly way to build a beautiful custom homepage in WordPress is to use a WordPress page builder plugin. There are a lot of options, and different people like different ones. Here is a list of drag-and-drop page builders for WordPress to get you started.

Thanks for reading, and have fun designing the front page of your WordPress site!