In this video, we’re gonna take a look at how to create a static page for your WordPress blog.
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Now, by default, WordPress will display all your latest blog posts right on the front page itself. Something like what you see here. As you can see, there are two posts in this blog. So, by default, all the posts are listed on the front page itself, and the latest post, of course, is listed right on top.
But in some cases, you may not want to use WordPress strictly as a blogging site. You may want to use WordPress more as a CMS or a content management system. In that case, you can always create a static front page and add whatever content you want to the front page itself, and dedicate a new page where all your latest blog posts will be listed. So now, I’ve logged in to my WordPress dashboard. Now, before you can enable a static front page, you need to create at least two new pages. So we’re going to create those two new pages right now by clicking on “Pages,” and click on “Add New.”
So the first page that I’m gonna create, I’m going to name it as “Home.” Of course, you can name this page anything you want, but generally, I like to name it as Home, and this is the page that we’re gonna set as our homepage or our static front page. So you can always add some content according to how you want your homepage to look like.
So now, I’ve created my homepage, and very quickly, I’m going to publish this page, so I’ll just go ahead and click on “Publish.” And now, as you can see, the homepage is published, so I’m gonna click on “Add New,” and I’m going to create another page, and this page will be where all my latest blog posts will be listed at. So I’m just gonna call this page “Blog,” and you can leave the content entirely empty, and then just click on “Publish” to publish this new page.
And now that I have two new pages, one which I named as Home, and the second, which I named as Blog, then all I need to do is…I’m just gonna minimize all this so you can see what I’m doing…I’m gonna click on “Settings,” and click on “Reading.”
Now, under the Reading settings configuration page, by default, the front page will display all your latest posts. So if you wanna create a static page, you need to check this option to create a static page, and then select which page will appear on the front or as the main page of the blog. So I’m going to select the page I created earlier called, “Home,” and then you need to select which page all your latest blog posts will appear. And I’m going to select the second page that I’ve created, which I’ve named as “Blog.” And here, you can control how many latest posts are shown on your blog page. By default, these two values should be 10, and you can just leave it as 10, then I’m gonna click on “Save changes.”
Okay, so my settings have been saved, and now we’re gonna see how the changes will reflect in your WordPress blog itself. So this is how my WordPress blog used to look like with all the latest blog posts right in the main page itself, and now that I’ve created a static front page, you’ll see that the main page of my blog will show my static front page itself. So what happened to all the blog posts? Well, that’s very easy to see. If you just look at the top navigation bar, and of course, this depends on what type of WordPress theme that you’re using. Some WordPress themes would display all the navigation links right on top, some would display it somewhere here. In case of this theme, all the pages are listed right on top. So you can see that if I click “Home,” I’ll basically go to the main page of my WordPress blog, and I’ll see this welcome message here. All my blog posts are now under the page called “Blog.” So if I click on that…and there, you can see that all my blog posts are now under this new page I created, which is called “Blog.” So that’s how you create a static front page in WordPress and make use of the CMS or content management system capabilities in WordPress itself.