How to Add a Static Home Page to a Blog?

If you have already have a blog but then decided to add in some static pages to make it look like a normal website. Can you do that?

Or, you are thinking to move your blog from root directory to a new directory called “blog” and the default home page is a static page with no blog posts. Can you do that?

The answer is "Yes!". In fact, it is quite easy to achieve, not as complicated as one thought.

1. Log in to your wordpress.
2. Create 2 new pages at the “Pages” section.
3. One page named it as “Home” and the other one named it as “Blog”.
4. Go to the “Settings” at the left hand panel and click on “Reading”.
5. At “Front Page Displays”, select “A static page (select below)”.
6. At the “Front page”, select “Home” and at the “Posts Page”, select “Blog”.
7. Click on the below green button “Save Changes” to save.
8. Now go to your site and you will see a new tab “Blog” added to the navigation.
9. And your site home page is a new home page (if you have not added in any content, it is displayed as blank page but with header and navigation shown).

Two “Home” Tabs Found in the Navigation Bar

10. If your site is showing two “Home” tabs in the navigation bar, you will have to get rid of the old “Home” tab. This can be done by editing your “header.php” file.
11. In your wordpress dashboard, click on “Appearance” on the left hand panel.
12. Then click on “Editor” and “Header” on the right hand side.
13. You may like to backup a copy of this file before making changes.
14. Copy the whole content of the file, open your notepad editor and paste in the content.
15. Save the file as “header.php” into your hard disk.
16. Go back to header.php in the wordpress, look for the line that looks something like

    <li> ..... ..... Home ..... .... </li>

17. For example as follow:

<li class="<? if(is_home()) echo 'current_page_item'; ?>"> <a href="<?php echo get_option('home'); ?>/">Home</a></li> 

18. Remove this line and click “Update File” to save.
19. Go to your site and you should see now, you have only one “Home” tab.
20. Next, check your blog section by clicking on the “Blog” tab.
21. All the blog posts should move over the “Blog” tab, the URL should look like www.mydomain.com/blog now.

If you are concerned that the URLs of the blog posts will change but it will not be the case as they will still remain the same as before. That’s the beauty of using this method.