WordPress Tutorial – Make a Static Page Your Home Page – Part 3

This Beginner-level WordPress Tutorial is a follow-up to “Make a Static Page Your Home/Front Page” and “Make a Static Page Your Home Page – Part 2”.

Part 2 shows a way to hide the link to a page that you use as your home page so that people aren’t confused by the fact that there are two links to the same page in your navigation. That method works when you have navigation in the sidebar that shows subpages AND subpages are part of your site. If your site doesn’t have subpages, there is no way to hide the link to your home page. It will show as a subpage link. That sentence is no longer true! As an intrepid reader points out, the WordPress Pages navigation widget now allows you to exclude any page from its links.

The video tutorial below shows you how to a make a custom sidebar using WordPress Widgets so that you can remove page navigation from the sidebar and make the home page a subpage whose link does not appear in the navigation.

But the best way to go (I haven’t made a video tutorial for this yet) is to exclude the Home page from your Pages navigation in the sidebar using the Pages widget. As noted by a reader commenting on Part 2 of this Static Page / Home Page WordPress tutorial, you can keep Pages navigation in your sidebar without having to show a link to your Home page there.

The Pages navigation widget allows you to exclude any page using the page ID number.

Here’s how to find the ID number for a Page or Post.

You can insert the Page ID of any page you want to exclude into the “Exclude:” box when you Edit the Pages widget. Find the ID number of your Home page, put that in the “Exclude:” box of the Pages widget, and the link to the Home page will not show in the sidebar.

Mark McLaren
McBuzz Communications