Sometimes it’s better or preferable to have a static front page. Perhaps this is more than just a blog for you–it may be your business’s website–and having your posts somewhere else than the main page of your blog/website is better for you. WordPress automatically sets your blog posts as the front page, but you can easily switch it around.

I’m currently creating a website for a client of mine with a static front page and the blog posts under the “blog” tab instead of being the first thing readers see–it’s not complete by any means, but you can view what I’m referring to by going to it here: www.ChannelReef.com. *Edit–I’ve now changed themes on this site; I no longer had to use the below system to have a static front page.

Thankfully, WordPress makes it exceptionally easy to change your blog so it’s more of a website with a blog tab. Here’s what you can do, step-by-step:

1. Create two pages. I called the first one “Home”, and put some verbiage in there for the start of my home page. The second I named “Blog”–however, do not put in any wording; it’ll just get overridden. Publish both pages.
2. Go to the Administration–>Settings–>Reading panel. Set “front page displays” to your chosen home page. Set “posts page” to your blog page. Save.

* You’ll want to edit your permalinks settings to enable showing the page title as the address. View my how-to on doing that here: “Changing Permalinks“.

*Also, if you really don’t want a blog page at all, you have that option.  Simply choose no page for the “posts page” in Step 2.

If you need more help, please feel free to contact me. Or, you can read up more on this topic within the WordPress Codex here: “Static Front Page + Blog“.

Should anyone be curious, I do have a couple of thoughts on the concept of not having a blog post page as your homepage on your site.  Personally, I would infrequently utilize this action. One, I tend to find the sites that are constantly changing content on their front page to be more engaging when I visit them. If I have to click over to a blog page to read some new content on a site, I often won’t bother. Two, having a constantly changing homepage seems to be more SEO-friendly. When the search engines crawl your site, having fresh, new content on your homepage means that it will get indexed more, shows up more, and brings more visitors. While both of these concerns could be addressed by going into your static front page and adding new content or changing things up frequently…that seems like a lot of work! I, myself, would rather post blog articles than alter my homepage (that I took a long time making sure it looked perfect, I might add) on a regular basis. Not to deter you from making the change to a static front page on your WordPress.org blog if that’s what you desire, but to make sure you think about it!

What are your thoughts on altering your WordPress blog so that it has a static front page? Do you think it’s more professional? Better or worse for SEO? I’d love to hear what others think of this–comment below!