Transcript
Introduction
Are you looking to configure your home page display and how posts will appear? Well, let’s go to Reading Settings. When you’re in the dashboard, navigate to Settings and click on Reading.
Homepage display
The Your Home Page Displays section located at the top is an important part of setting up your site’s front page. It lets you choose between a feed of your most recent blog posts or an existing static page. If you opt for your latest posts, your front page will be a chronological list of your most recent blog posts. It’s important to note that if you choose your latest posts as your home page display, you must build your home page within the blog home template, depending on your theme. Let’s see this in action by going to the Site Editor. If we click on Pages, we will see at the top next to the Home icon our home page is our Blog Home Template. When we open up our Blog Home Template, we will see our latest posts. As mentioned, this is where we will edit our home page if we select the latest posts as our home page display.
I’ve chosen to set up a static homepage for my business website. I will go to the drop-down and the home page and then select the home page I already created. I also created a news page and will set that as my static posts page. You can skip this step if you don’t want a blog or posts page on your site. Remember that if you choose this option, your home page will be assigned to the pages template by default, and your posts page will be assigned to the blog home template. We can see how this works when we go to Pages and open our homepage. In our sidebar settings, we will see that the home page has been assigned to the pages template. If we make our way to our news page or our posts page, we will see that this page has been assigned to the blog home template, and we will edit this page within the blog home template. Something else to mention: when you build your header, remember to add the Home Link block as your home navigation item. This link will always direct visitors to your homepage regardless of which home page display setting you selected.
Blog pages show at most
The next section determines how many blog posts are shown before requiring users to click over to a new page. I suggest leaving the number at 10 as you don’t want to impact your site’s loading time negatively. Please note that you can change this number when you edit the Query Loop block displaying your posts.
Syndication feeds
This next setting controls how many of your website’s posts are shown in the RSS feed. The RSS feed allows users to subscribe to your website and receive updates whenever you publish new content. Think of it as a notification system that informs readers about your latest posts. When you add new content to your site, the RSS feed automatically updates to include the new posts. By adjusting this setting, you can decide how many posts will be visible in the feed at any time. You can set this to any amount that suits your needs, but I will keep it at 10.
I can also specify whether the feed will include a summary of the post’s full content. I will switch this over to Summary or Excerpt, showing any catchy excerpt I wrote in the meta box when I created my post.
Search engine visibility
Lastly, we have an option called search engine visibility. I recommend checking this box only if your website is in the development phase. It will minimize the chances of it being picked up. But don’t forget to uncheck it when your site goes into production, as you will want search engines to index your site.
Practical
Use WordPress Playground to test your knowledge.
- Go to Pages and create a homepage and a blog page.
- Make your way to Settings > Reading and set a static homepage and a static blog page.
- Check to see which templates have been assigned to these pages.
- Remember, you will build your blog page or posts page using the blog home template.