WordPress front page logic cheatsheet

WordPress front page logic is a mess. No — a Mess. :)

It is an old artifact of development, from the time when WP started to break away from purely blogging paradigm. The static front page functionality was added, but in quite an awkward way.

I have stumbled over this innumerable times and finally decided to note down how it works once and for all.

Front page cheatsheet

	Default	Static front page
Front page displays	Your latest posts	Front page: Front	Posts page: Posts
URL	example.com (site URL)		example.com/posts (page URL)
Template hierarchy	`front-page.php`		`home.php`
	`home.php`	- `$custom.php` - `page-$slug.php` - `page-$id.php` - `page.php` - `singular.php`	`home.php`
	`index.php`
Body classes	- `home` - `blog`	- `home` - `page` - `page-id-$id`	`blog`
Loop and content	posts index	page	posts index
`home_url()`	`https://example.com`
`get_post_type_archive_link('post')`	`https://example.com`	`https://example.com/posts`
`is_front_page()`	`true`		`false`
`is_home()`	`true`	`false`	`true`
`is_page()`	`false`	`true`	`false`
`get_option( 'show_on_front' )`	`'posts'`	`'page'`
`get_option( 'page_on_front' )`	`0`	Front page ID
`get_option( 'page_for_posts' )`	`0`		Posts page ID

What is home?

The one especially confusing mismatch to note is that home is all over the place.

home body class and home_url() function refer to front page. They mean location in site (Site URL).

home.php template and is_home conditional refer to posts index. They mean type of page in site (blog posts).

Front page template

front-page.php template is great for very custom front pages. Since it has high priority in both cases of template hierarchy — it is hard to override and publicly released themes rarely include it.

Be aware of it for custom builds, it makes things easier for them.

Summary

Default front page behaves as combination of front page and blog posts archive.

Static front page resides at front page location and behaves as a page.

Posts page resides at assigned page’s location, but behaves as a blog posts index (it being a page is mostly ignored).

TL;DR

In a nutshell you use:

static front page to customize, moving archive from there;
posts page to change location of posts archive.

Materials used

2 Comments

janw.oostendorp 2016-05-17 #

Here is a very nice overview of the templates logic: https://wphierarchy.com/
Andrey “Rarst” Savchenko 2016-05-17 #

Not a fan of that one myself, difficult to follow for my taste. I tend to use one from Chip, but it got some recent bits missing (like singular.php).