Or, How to Set Up a Landing Page on the Home Page and Make the Blog a Separate Page.
The default WordPress install of your new blog will put your blog posts on the home page. But if you’d rather have a “static” home page* with copy on it, you can make this change easily. Here’s how:
- Go to your WordPress dashboard.
- Go to Pages > Add new page, name it Home. Add content. Publish.
- Go to Pages > Add new page, name it Blog. Do not add content. Publish.
- Go to Settings > Reading, change default for front page displays to “A static page.” With dropdowns, choose Home for Front page, and Blog for Posts page.
- Save changes.
- Go to your live site and refresh the page.
In most cases, this series of steps will work. If you are working with a child theme, there may be a slightly different variation of this method. In some cases, I have to go to Appearances > Menus and make sure the new pages are on my custom menu.
*Although this home page is called “static”, you can change the text and pictures on it any time.
Just an update to this post: I have a blog that uses an old theme that doesn’t support custom menus, so when I made a new home page, it showed up twice on the navigation bar. The best solution was for me to get a new theme on that blog that supports custom menus. Now it recognizes the static home page without having “Home” twice on the navigation.