Ok I need to vent. Setting up a website in WordPress is less intuitive than it should be. I got lost so many times, going back and forth between various editors, getting the connection between the pages all wrong, freaking out that I lost my home page, which took me hours to set up… I guess it will get easier but so far it’s been a struggle.

What happened

I wanted to set up my main, welcome page as a home page of this website to introduce what this website is about in general.

When testing my website, I realised that whenever I would click “home”, it would send me to the Blog page. It was not a matter of the right hyperlink, but an error around the type of page I have set for a home page and a blog page. I guess that was because I have chosen a template for my website which is focused around a blog, so the blog was understood as the main page. In my case, however, although I want to write in my blog on a regular, it’s not the main part of my website.

So. When I tried to revert to my regular home page, to my terror I realised that all my home page content is nowhere to be found and instead I have only my first blog post, front and centre of my website. Agh!

To my terror I realised that all my home page content is nowhere to be found

This is when I started to panic. Luckily, I realised that the homepage how I intended it to be got magically saved as a template under a name “Blog home” to make it more confusing.

After tinkering with it back and forth, I finally figured it out and now I have my normal front page of the website (it has its own template), and my regular Blog page with stories like this one live (rent free).

What added to the confusion

• The home page as a page is nowhere to be found. It’s not in Pages section of the WordPress editor, so where is it?
• Home page is apparently called Front page. Hence the confusion between Blog Home and Front page…
• Blog pages are not considered to be pages in this editor either.

I managed to recover things and they seem to make sense. I am now afraid to touch it not to break it. Also, I need a nice cup of coffee and a walk after this one.

Learnings and tips

1. Do consider an intro course about working with WordPress. Don’t be impatient like me. Here is the course made by WordPress. I will also check it out soon, I promise.
2. If you, like me, didn’t start with the point 1, then consider the type of website you chose when you were selecting a template. The purpose of the website may imply which page is the most important.
3. Don’t immediately panic and start recreating the main page’s content that took you hours to build. Check the Templates section in the WordPress editor.
4. Check if you can revise the past versions of your webpages to go back to the previous version.
5. When stuff breaks, consider taking a break and going for a walk :)

Let me know how you got a hang of the WordPress editor, share your learning fails, or give me some tips on your favourite WordPress course in the comments.