How To Create A Separate Page For Blog Posts in WordPress

Contrary to popular belief, creating a separate page for blog posts in WordPress is relatively easy. WordPress creates a home page filled with blog posts automatically. Being first designed as a blogging platform, this shouldn’t be a surprise. But changing the default settings and creating a page exclusively for blog contents might seem tricky to a lot of newbies. This article aims to fix that.

For people are completely new to WordPress I’m going to start at the most basic level. If you’re comfortable with WordPress you can skip ahead to here.

What is a Blog Page?

A blog page is a page where all of your posts are displayed in an organized fashion. By default, WordPress sets the blog page as the homepage of your site. The homepage appears when you type the URL of your website on a browser.

Changing Default Settings

First of all, I want you to take a look at your admin dashboard. From the dashboard, go to Settings > Reading. The resulting page will be the Reading Settings page.

At the top of the page, there is an option titled Front page displays. By default, it should be set to Your latest posts. To change the default behavior, you need to change this to the static page option.
This is the setting that determines whether your blog posts will appear on the home page or not. Now that you know where to change the settings, we first have to lay the ground work.

We need to create two new pages for the blog page and the home page.

Creating New Pages

First, we will create the Homepage. Go to Pages > Add New to create a new page. Provide a title in the Enter title here area. I am going to call this Home.

There is a Page Attributes box on the right hand side. Click on Template settings and a list of available templates will appear. I am working with the Twenty Fourteen theme. The available templates in this theme are Default Template, Full Width Page and Contributor Page.

Most of the new themes include a Full Width Template of their own to create the home page. In the past, the Front Page Template was the most popular term used to indicate the template for creating home page.

If you are working with the Twenty Twelve theme, you will see a Front Page Template is available. You can choose this template for your Home page. Anyway, we are going to select the Full Width Page template as the template for our Home page.

Disallow Comments On Homepage

At the top of the page, click on the Screen Options. A list of new menus will appear. Check the Discussion option.

Now, if you go to the bottom of the page, you will notice a Discussion box has appeared. Uncheck the Allow comments and Allow trackbacks and pingbacks on this page options.

All we need to do now is click the Publish button to make this page available for use.

Creating the Blog Page

Next we need to create the Blog page. Creating this page is almost the same as creating the Home page so we can speed through it.

I will use Blog as the page title. In the Page Attributes box, you can choose the Default Template as the template for this new page.

A lot of themes provide an exclusive template titled Blog for this purpose. If your theme comes with one, use that template to get the best possible look for your blog page. As I am using the Twenty Fourteen theme, I am going to use the Default Template. After choosing a template for your blog page, do not forget to disable comments for this page too. Then publish it.

Setting a Separate Page for Blog Posts

We have now created two separate pages for our Home and Blog. Now we need to change the default settings.

Go to Settings > Reading and change the Front page displays option to a static page. Click on the Front page option and a dropdown menu will appear. Choose our newly created Home as the Front page. This is going to be the homepage for our site.

For the Posts page option, select the Blog as our blog page. Now hit Save Changes to update the settings. And we’re done!

Now, if you visit your website, you will see the new home page in action. And more importantly, when you publish a new post, the post will appear automatically in the dedicated page for posts, which is Blog in my case.

You can also have excerpts of your blog posts appear on the homepage, but that’s the topic of another post.

I hope this article has provided a clear instruction for creating a custom blog page for your posts. However, if you still have any question, don’t hesitate to leave a ask below.