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, make your way to Settings and then click on Reading.
The Your Home Page Displays section located at the top is an important part of setting
up your site's front page.
It allows you to 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
will need to 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.
And when we open up our Blog Home Template, we will see our latest posts.
And as mentioned, this is the place we will edit our home page if we select latest posts
as our home page display.
For my business website, I've chosen to set a static home page.
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.
If you don't want a blog or posts page on your site, you can just skip this step.
Keep in mind 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 make our way to Pages and open up our home page.
And in our sidebar settings, we will see that the home page has been assigned to the pages
template.
And 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 home page regardless of which home page display
setting you selected.
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 negatively impact your site's
loading time.
Please note that you can also change this number when you edit the Query Loop block
displaying your posts.
This next setting controls how many of your websites posts are shown in the RSS feed.
The RSS feed is a way for users to subscribe to your website and receive updates whenever
you publish new content.
Think of it like a notification system that keeps readers informed 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 of these posts will be visible in
the feed at any given 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 or the full content of the post.
I am going to switch this over to Summary or Excerpt which will show any catchy excerpt
I wrote in the meta box when I created my post.
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.