How to edit your homepage in WordPress

You change the headline, click Update and reload the site, and the old headline is still there. On WordPress this rarely means the save failed. Usually you edited something other than what WordPress serves at the root of your domain.

“Edit the homepage” can mean three different jobs. You might be choosing which page WordPress shows at the root, editing that page’s content, or changing the template that lays it out. Each job happens on a different screen. Our guide to editing pages in WordPress covers the page editor in general. This article covers the homepage, which is where most of the traps are.

Find out what produces your homepage before you edit

You need three answers first, and they take about two minutes to get:

1. Settings > Reading. “Your homepage displays” is set to either Your latest posts or A static page. If it says static, write down which page is selected as the Homepage.
2. The Appearance menu. If it has an Editor item, your theme is a block theme. If it shows Customize and no Editor, your theme is a classic theme.
3. The live homepage, viewed while logged in. If the admin bar shows Edit with Elementor or another builder’s button, a page builder owns the layout.

Those answers tell you where to make the edit:

Your setup	Where to edit
Static page, block editor	Pages > All Pages, then the page named in Reading
Block theme with a Front Page template	Appearance > Editor > Templates > Front Page
Latest posts, block theme	Appearance > Editor, the Home or Index template
Classic theme	Appearance > Customize for the theme’s homepage options. If the theme has a front-page.php file, the layout lives in that file.
Page builder	The builder, opened from the live homepage

One habit prevents most problems. Open the live homepage and click Edit in the admin bar. You get the document WordPress is actually serving, not a duplicate with the same title.

How to choose which page is your homepage

WordPress.org’s guide to creating a static front page gives the steps:

1. Publish the page you want to use. The Homepage dropdown only lists published pages, and our guide to adding pages in WordPress explains why drafts and private pages are left out.
2. Go to Settings > Reading and select A static page.
3. Choose your page in the Homepage dropdown.
4. If you run a blog, you can also choose a Posts page. WordPress will not let the Posts page be the same page as the Homepage.
5. Click Save Changes.

Calling a page “Home” does not make it the homepage. Only this setting does. After you save, WordPress marks the page “Front Page” in your Pages list, which makes it easy to find next time.

Why the page you picked may not be what visitors see

A template can override the Reading setting. WordPress.org’s additional guide to the Site Editor says that in a block theme, a Front Page template takes precedence over the Reading setting. Classic themes have the same rule. The template hierarchy uses front-page.php for the front page whatever Reading says. The name home.php is misleading: it is the posts index, not the homepage.

Here is what that means in practice. Suppose Reading names your page, you edit it, you publish, and nothing changes. Open Appearance > Editor > Templates and look for a Front Page template. A template only shows a page’s own content if it contains a Post Content block. Without that block, your page edits have nowhere to appear. You have two options: add a Post Content block to the template so page edits show up, or edit the template itself.

How to edit a static homepage in the block editor

1. Go to Pages > All Pages and find the entry marked Front Page.
2. Click Edit. Change the text, images and buttons directly in the blocks. If a block is nested inside groups or columns, open List View to select it.
3. Click Save (called Update in older versions) and wait for it to finish before you leave the screen.
4. Open the homepage in a private window. The private window skips your logged-in view and your browser cache.

Colors and fonts that appear across the site belong in the Styles panel, not in each block’s settings. If you style blocks one by one, the next homepage change means redoing that work.

How to edit the homepage in a block theme’s Site Editor

If your site shows latest posts, or the theme ships a Front Page template, the homepage is a template, and it may not appear in your Pages list at all. WordPress’s own contributors acknowledge this. Gutenberg issue #56244 is about making the Home page easier to find in the editor.

1. Go to Appearance > Editor > Templates.
2. Open Front Page. If there is none, open Home, the template for the posts page. If neither exists, open Index, the fallback. Some themes use slightly different names.
3. Edit the blocks and click Save.

Pay attention to what you are editing. A change to the Front Page template only affects the root URL. The header and footer are template parts shared by every page, so editing them inside the homepage template changes them across the whole site. If a template edit goes wrong, the Site Editor keeps revisions and lets you reset a customized template to the theme’s default.

How to edit a classic theme homepage

Classic themes send you to Appearance > Customize. The Homepage Settings panel there mirrors the Reading setting. Many themes add their own panels for homepage sections, such as the hero, featured boxes and widget areas. If the theme has a front-page.php file, some of the layout is written in PHP and no setting will change it. That is a job for a child theme, and our guide to editing themes without losing work explains why you should never edit the parent theme’s files.

How to edit a homepage built with Elementor or another builder

Open the live homepage and click Edit with Elementor in the admin bar, then click Update when you are done. Starting from the live page matters. On one WordPress.org support thread, an Astra starter-template import had created two Home pages and two Elementor Default Kits. The owner kept editing the copy that was not live, and caching turned out not to be the cause. If you think you have duplicates, check which page Settings > Reading names before you delete anything.

Do not open a builder page in the block editor and rewrite it there, because that can break the builder’s layout data. Elementor’s History panel, at the bottom left of the editor, lists recent revisions if you need to step back.

You may see “Sorry, the content area was not found in your page. You must call the_content function in the current template.” Elementor’s help page on that error gives two causes. Either the template has no content area, or you are trying to edit a dynamic page such as an archive or a shop page. Use Theme Builder for dynamic pages. A template that is missing the_content needs a developer or a different theme.

Why your homepage changes are not showing

Check these in order. The cheap, common causes come first:

1. You edited the wrong document. Click Edit from the live page and compare. Confirm the status is Published, not Draft, Pending or Scheduled. Also confirm you are on the live domain and not a staging copy or a translated version.
2. A template controls the layout. See the Front Page and Post Content section above.
3. A cache is serving an old copy. There can be several layers: your browser, a cache plugin, your host’s cache and a CDN. Elementor sites have one more, the CSS files Elementor generates, which its changes-not-appearing guide tells you to clear at Elementor > Tools > Clear Files & Data. Purge each layer once. If a full purge changes nothing, the cache was not the problem, so stop purging and go back to step 1.
4. The editor will not load or save. Plugin conflicts, PHP memory limits and host firewalls cause this. Take a backup first (see what a backup plugin covers), then isolate the cause using our guide to fixing plugins that are not working.
5. It only looks wrong on mobile. Builders store separate settings for mobile. Check at phone width before you decide the desktop edit failed.

Three problems that look like homepage edits but are not

The WooCommerce Shop page. WooCommerce assigns its Shop page separately from your homepage. According to WooCommerce’s Product Catalog documentation, the layout of that page comes from the Product Catalog template in the Site Editor. Content you type into the Shop page may not appear.

Google still shows the old version. Search results are not your website. Google Search Central’s page on asking Google to recrawl says recrawling can take days to weeks. You can request it once with URL Inspection in Search Console. Requesting it repeatedly does not make it faster.

The homepage vanished after a theme switch. WordPress.com’s homepage troubleshooting guide notes that the old homepage can end up in Pages > Drafts. The same check works on any WordPress site: republish the page, then select it again in Settings > Reading.

When to stop and get help

Stop when the fix means editing front-page.php or adding the_content to a template. Stop when the error points to a host limit such as memory or a firewall rule, because only your host can change those. And stop before you delete pages or re-import a starter template to fix duplicates you have not identified yet. Doing that before you know which copy is live usually makes the damage worse.

Whoever helps you will want the same things: the URL, what Settings > Reading says, the theme, the builder, and the exact error text. If you would rather hand the change over, SiteSelf can make homepage and page edits through chat on request and tell you what it changed and checked, though it refuses pages owned by Elementor, Divi or Beaver Builder when the work starts.