What is a Homepage?

When the internet was first developed, a lot of the terms that were created were based on the existing, material world. This is why the term “email” is related to the physical act of delivering postal material and the term “pages” is related to sheets of paper in a book.

Today, a home page (sometimes written “homepage”) refers to the main or principal area of a given website. More precisely, the home page is usually associated with the top-level domain of a website or its best-known URL. Any other URLs belonging to the same top-level domain are just known as “pages.”

For example, WordPress’s “home page” is located at www.WordPress.org while all the other URLs that end in “…WordPress.org” are known as pages. The term “home page” specifically refers to the first page that visitors see when they arrive at a website’s top-level domain address.

When WordPress is installed, the default setting is to show a list of your most recent posts in reverse chronological order (i.e. the newest one first). You can, however, choose to display a static page as your homepage or do something else.

Without having to get into the foundational PHP code of WordPress, the easiest way to modify the layout of your home page is by choosing the right theme. The theme’s settings will allow you to customize what visitors see when they arrive at your home page.

Alternatively, you can log into your administration area and click “Settings” in the left-hand column and then “Reading.” A section entitled “Your homepage displays” will let you choose whether to show your latest posts (the default setting) or a static (unchanging) page.

Note: To choose a static page to display as your homepage, it first must be created and published!