Problems stopping a static page and reverting back to my home page as default

Hi squiggles!

There are two things I’d like us to start with.

1. Go to Settings>Permalinks in your WP Admin area and select “Post name” under “Common Settings” and hit “Save Changes”

2. Go to Settings>Reading and let me know everything it says on that page.

After that, we should be able to make some more progress! ??

Okay I just completed step one. As far as number two – It says “Front Pgae Displays: A Static Page”. Then Below that, “Posts Page: Home”.

I don’t see how anything else on that page is relevant. I know what all the other settings there do and none could possibly affect this issue.

Just, Blog Pages Show at Most, Syndication Feeds Show the Most Recent, For Each Article in a Feed Show Full Text or Summary, Search Engine Visibility, Featured Content, and Follower Settings.

Thanks for the info. You are correct in that it is the “Front page displays” area that is the important part here.

So you have front page displays as a static page, and your posts page is “Home”. What does the “Front page:” dropdown say?

Also, if you click on the “static page” link – where it says “A static page (select below) -, does it go to your pages (not posts) listing?

Your front page should be set to one of the pages you see in the list you get by clicking “static page”. Also, the page you are using for you home page should not be a blog-style template. (Look at the “Template” dropdown on the page’s editor.) Without knowing your theme, I can’t say which template you should select for your home page. Each theme comes with its own set of templates.

Also, now that you have Permalinks set to Post Name, double check the Permalink setting on each page’s editor. You home page should not have an editable Permalink, and the About page should have an editable one.

If this doesn’t help, let me know what theme you are using, and we’ll take it farther. We need to get your site like you want it!

The drop down says: About, Artists, Contact, Home

Yes, clicking on that link goes to my pages and not my posts.

The template drop down under the Home page editor is set to Default Template. The other options are contributor page or full width page. My theme is the 2014 WordPress theme offered by default through the templates section.

My Home page permalink is editable but the about page does not have an edit button next to it. Could this perhaps be the problem? Did I somehow confuse WordPress into thinking my About page is my main page and the Home page is a secondary page? Where do we go from here to fix it?

Thanks again for the research.

Based on how you described your problem, and the way I see the links that your nav bar are showing, I expected that would be the case (About permalink not editable). But it never hurts to get as much info as you can.

I have done some testing on one of my sites, and I think I know how to fix this. I don’t know *how* it got broken, though!

This will require you to have access to something like phpMyAdmin where you can access your database. If you can’t access your database, then the only thing I know to do is duplicate (replicate) your Home and About pages so that they get a new identification number in the database, which should allow you to reassign your home page.

Anway, if you *do* choose the database access route, please be very careful. I don’t say this because I have any doubt as to your abilities. I say that like I would say even to a 20-year Oracle DBA with certifications lining every wall.

The first step is to turn your Permalinks back to “Default” on the Settings>Permalinks admin page. This will allow us to see what the ID# of your Home and Admin pages are. Make a note of those 2 numbers.

Once you have saved that, go back to the page editor for your Home page and see what the “page_ID” number is in the Permalink line.

Then go to your database administrator (phpMyAdmin for example) and log in as your MySQL DB User. Or, you may be logged in automatically if you are using cPanel or something like that to access phpMyAdmin.

You will see a listing of databases in a tree view on the left. Open up the database your site is using and click on the link for the wp_options table.

What we are looking for is a row in that table that has a value of page_on_front in the option_name column. You can click on the option_name column header to sort by the values in that column.

The option_value value for page_on_front should be the page_ID of your About page.

phpMyAdmin will allow you to double-click on that value to change it. Put in the page_ID number of your home page and hit <Enter>.

That should tell your site that your front page is your Home page, which means that you will no longer be able to change the Permalink for it (which is what we want!) and that you can change the Permalink for your About page.

Therefore, the Home menu option on your site should now point to your base domain, and the About menu should go to your About page!

If this didn’t work, change the option_value in the row we found back to what it was, and we will need to explore further options. Or, if you can’t edit the field directly, let me know and I will give you the SQL code for it.

Good luck! ??

So, thank you so much for all the help! Before I tried this complicated process that may have doomed me because of my inexperience, ha ha, I called up Bluehost for tech support to see if they could fix the problem. Basically, they fixed it really fast by doing the following (To the best I can understand it):

Deleted the “Home” page. My posts, although being displayed on the “Home” tab, were not posted to this page and this page only. In other words, deleting this page would not delete all of my posts posted so far.

Selected front page displays: your latest posts under the reading section

Now I was able to access my “home” page by clicking the link to the left-hand side but the “Home” button was now gone in my top menu bar.

To re-add a home button, go to appearance and menus. Create/update a main menu which has all of your website tabs and set them to load to the according pages plus, add a home selection and set the URL (Under the drop down menu) to the main site URL (Which is now your “home” page).

Make sure on this menu editor that the check box below titled “Top primary menu” is checked.

Done! Double check that you now have you home button back.

I think this may only work like this for this specific layout (WordPress 2014 layout) but I could be mistaken.

Awesome!! I’m glad you were able to get that done.

That’s pretty much exactly what we would have done if you weren’t comfortable with the database part.

The page ID’s in the database were off, so deleting and recreating the Home page and adjusting the menu fixed it right up. Good news!

Best wishes in your further endeavors, and may they not be so perplexing. ??