3 Steps for a WordPress Static Homepage

Taking a detour of sorts with this post to have a look at a couple of tricky issues that I encountered on my websites last week. Posting solutions to these as I think it's worth sharing. Although a bit technical, they're straight forward.

1. Static Homepage on WordPress Based Site: This is if you want to have a homepage that is not frequently changing like your blog page as you know by default, WordPress shows your blog posts on the front page of your site. Why would you want to have a static page as your homepage given that it's not Search Engine friendly? The answer is this could be a site where blogging is not the primary activity and the intention is to rank on a set of constant keywords and give it a flashy and attractive look.

It's really simple and it doesn't require editing or coding.

Step1: Create 2 pages, one titled "Home" and the other one "Blog". Put the static content that you want to have on the "Home" page, leave the "Blog" page blank and publish both the pages.

Step2: Update the following on the Administration > Settings > Reading panel.

a. On Front page displays, check the "Static Page" radio button
b. Choose "Home" page for Front page and "Blog" page for Posts page drop downs

Step3: Finally, enable permalinks to show the page title or else it won't serve the purpose.

2. Theme getting dark on loading: Some of my blogging friends pointed out that my page was completely dark until it was fully loaded. I didn't realise this probably because the page was loading pretty quick on my machine. I know fully well that the average attention span of a visitor is 6-8 seconds and if your page didn't load in that time, chances are that you're going to lose that visitor who probably might not come back again because I couldn't show him what I am all about.

Now, I didn't want to change my theme since firstly I like the look of it, but more importantly I'd risk losing my search engine indexing if I did that. The solution was a simple three line code that my theme author gave me which I inserted in the stylesheet.css file which set my content background to white. By this the visitor can see the content clearly while the page loads fully. Just goes to show how having an honest audience can help you in identifying things which you aren't aware of yourself.