How to delete old home page & make a new one.

Hello Jeff,

It’s me again ??

Staging is a feature provided by your host, not WordPress itself. And implementations vary wildly from NO STATING AT ALL… to a single click to clone a site and a single click to push changes back to live… and a whole lot of variations of complexity in between.

As your site is hosting with SiteGround, your first point of call should be to review their guidance on the subject: https://www.siteground.com/tutorials/staging/

I am not sure how to switch out an old home page, which I don’t know how to edit as I would like. I would prefer to replace it with a totally different build.

If you go to SETTINGS => READING, you can set ANY existing page as your “Homepage” to be used as the entry page of your site.

But note that some themes and plugins (especially page builder plugins) may override this setting completely or not display the content in the default WordPress page editor and display the content in their own editor instead.

Your site uses the ELEMENTOR Pagebuilder plugin, so you might check out this plugin’s listing for its features and ask specific questions related to the page-building experience in their dedicated support forum.

Plugin Page: https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/elementor/

Plugin Support Forum: https://www.ads-software.com/support/plugin/elementor/

Good luck, and Godspeed in your work. Pax Romana!

Just Clone the original Home Page, this will make a DRAFT version of your Homepage. Edit out the contents of the clone of your Home Page. After you edit it. Hit the save or Update button. Go into the Page editor of your original Home Page and make it as a Draft, dont forget to update the permalinks of the two pages as well(ex. your original homepage permalink was https://example.com/home convert it to https://example.com/home-draft and the permalink of the clone homepage was https://example.com/home-2, make it https://example.com/home)

Thank you so very much George for the time and effort you spent on helping out a newbie… again.

I’m sorry for the late response. Once again I didn’t see any email notification for it, but that may be because I was scrambling so much with work, family & trying to right the ship as best I could before the big event came up. We struggled through it, but it would have been much better had I had a little more time and had seen your posts in time to make the site more functional in time. But better late than never.

I will be going through your post & links as I try and learn the ins and outs of WordPress and the associated plug-ins.

Thanks again for your help, and may Our Lord bless you richly for the love you showed in helping a stranger.

Thank you Jed! Your help is most appreciated.

How does one change a permalink? Can that be done within WordPress (or the Elementor plug-in) or is that done via the web host?

I’ve googled that, but the results I’m getting are a bit confusing.

Followup:

I figured out why I had been unable to see where to change URLs inside of WordPress. Most tutorials described how to change the way permalinks were automatically generated.

I remembered seeing that option before, but when I went back I could not see how to do so. I did not realize that one has to click on the title of the page for that option to appear.

and thanks again George. I used your tip today on how to change the home page:

“If you go to SETTINGS => READING, you can set ANY existing page as your “Homepage” to be used as the entry page of your site.”

It worked perfectly for me.