All About Your Site’s Home Page

Your Home Page is the one that is displayed when a visitor enters the address of your WordPress Site. Commonly, your blog will serve as the home page, and WordPress will automatically add a Home item as the first item on your menu bar. (That is the default WordPress setting.) If you instead want a static page as your home, you can go to the dashboard Settings→Reading menu, and click the ‘A static page‘ option, and specify an existing static page to serve as Home. (It will be called Home on the menu even if it has a different name when you created it.) If you don’t want a blog at all, you can leave the ‘Posts page‘ option as ‘–Select–‘, and no blog will be displayed. If you specify the name of an existing static page, then the default blog will be displayed using the title of that page. The content of that page (as well as the page’s template, such as Page with Post) is ignored: that static page serves only to set the title for the blog page.

Weaver Xtreme gives you options on just what appears as your home page. The Visibility→Menus panel has an option called ‘No Home Menu Item‘. If you check that, the automatically generated Home menu item goes away. That means if you have your blog set as the home page, there won’t be a Home menu item to get back to it, but entering just your site name will get you to the blog.

All that can be very confusing, to say the least. Here’s how to get exactly what you want as your Home page.

1. Create a static page that you want to serve as your Home page – If you want it called Home, then give the page Home as its title. Add content as needed. If you want this page to be your Blog Posts, then use the Page with Posts template when you create the page, and check the ‘Hide Page Title’ in the Per Page Options section. Don’t add any additional content.
2. Check the ‘No Home Menu Item’ option in the Visibility→Menus panel.
3. On the Settings→Reading menu, check the ‘A static page‘ option, and specify the page you defined in step 1 as the Front page. Set the Posts page top to ‘— Select —‘ if the static front page you specified will be your blog page or you don’t want any blog page at all. If the blog will be on a non-home page, then enter the name of a blank place holder for the blog, as usual.
4. You can use a Page with Posts page as your blog page, either as the Home page, or as a secondary page. Step 1 explained how to make it your Home page. Use the method of Step 3, and set the Posts page option to –Select–. This step is important. If you specify the static “Page with Posts” page in the selection box, you will end up with get the default blog page, and not your “Page with Posts” and any options you may have set for that page. And the main reason to use a “Page with Posts” for your blog page is to add filters to control just which posts are displayed — something you can’t do if you use the default Home page.