Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
What should I name my Wordpress homepage?
-
I work almost exclusively in wordpress now. And I always hesitate when it comes to naming a site's homepage. I have to give it a name - right? I usually pick the business name or /home. And then that is identifies as the site's static homepage in the Wordpress settings and it works just fine.
But I've started to get warning that it is an issue because it creates redirects. For example, I just ran the Ryte service analysis on a website and it warned me about "Non-indexable pages with high relevance" and it's basically my homepage that has 29 incoming links that "passes all pagerank to https://ourdomain/home
But what am I supposed to call my homepage if not "Home"? It's not like the old days where anyone has to type it in. The root domain loads the homepage just as it should.
Can anybody advise me regarding best practices for what to name a Wordpress homepage for good SEO?
With thanks in advance for your help.
-
"The primary domain will definitely resolve to the homepage. My question is fairly Wordpress specific. When you create a new page or post you give it a title. Calling it "home" makes it easy to find on the admin side in the list of pages.
Whatever page I set as the "homepage" in the Wordpress admin settings, then the domain will resolve to that page no matter what I call it. And no one has to add the title as part of the URL or anything after the / to get there.
I could leave off the title of the page completely. It's not ideal for when I hand it off to clients. (People like things to be clearly labeled what they are.) But is that what you are suggesting I always do? "
I would call the homepage "Home" for the clients Because is ideal for breadcrumbs. In some situations especially e-commerce, it might be smart if it's a very well-known brand do use the well-known brand name as a homepage. For instance, switching "Home" with "Bestbuy"
"Home » SEO blog » WordPress » What are breadcrumbs? Why are they important for SEO?"
See: https://yoast.com/breadcrumbs-seo/
the SERPS will show
"Home » SEO blog » WordPress » What are breadcrumbs? Why are they important for SEO?"
<title><strong>This is an example page title</strong> - <strong>Example.com</strong></title>
Yoast SEO offers an easy way to add breadcrumbs to your WordPress site via PHP. It will add everything necessary not just to add them to your site, but to get them ready for Google. Just add the following piece of code to your theme where you want them to appear:
`if ( function_exists('yoast_breadcrumb') ) { yoast_breadcrumb( ' ','` `' ); } ?>`-
If you have old you are I was like example.com/index.html or something like that. You can use this fantastic tool below the one labeled number two it is a miracle tool in my opinion for rewriting URLs U can write in anything in the custom URL and have it added to your htaccess file or nginx config file and you're up and running
-
https://yoast.com/research/permalink-helper.php (love this tool)
-
<label for="struct1">Default
?p=123</label> -
<label for="struct2">Day and Name
/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/</label> -
<label for="struct3">Month and Name
/%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%/</label> -
<label for="struct4">Category - Name
/%category%/%postname%/</label> -
<label for="struct5">Numeric
/archives/%post_id%</label> -
custom you can use /%postname%/ or anything
<label for="struct1"></label><label for="struct2"></label><label for="struct3"></label><label for="struct4"></label><label for="struct6">Custom: or add what you want to change no matter what the URL</label>
RedirectMatch 301 ^//([^/]+)$ https://yoast.com/help/my-redirects-do-not-work//$1Add the following redirect to the top of your
.htaccessfile:RedirectMatch 301 ^/([^/]+)/.html$ https://homepage.com/$1Add the following redirect to the top of your
.htaccessfile:RedirectMatch 301 ^/([0-9]{4})/([0-9]{2})/([0-9]{2})/(?!page/)(.+)$ https://homepage.com/$4<form method="post">```
Even for NGINX> <form method="post"> > > Add the following redirect to the NGINX config file: > > ``` > rewrite "^/index.html" https://homepage.com/?p=$ permanent; > ```</form> If you’re moving your WordPress site to an entirely new domain, you’ll need to perform a domain redirect to avoid losing your content’s SEO. These instructions assume that you’ve backed up your site and[ moved it to its new domain](https://wordpress.org/support/article/moving-wordpress/). To perform this redirect, open up your _.htaccess_ file, and add this code to the top: `#Options +FollowSymLinks RewriteEngine on RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.newsite.COM/$1 [R=301,L]` Use your new domain in place of _newsite.com_, and then save the file. You can also use any of the above-mentioned plugins to accomplish this task, as long as you activate it on your old site. Use your new domain in place of _newsite.com_, and then save the file. You can also use any of the above-mentioned plugins to accomplish this task, as long as you activate it on your old site. * https://wordpress.org/support/article/creating-a-static-front-page/ * https://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-themes/how-to-create-a-custom-homepage-in-wordpress/ * **Big photos** * https://i.imgur.com/U3rPAox.png * https://i.imgur.com/IR8plPZ.png * If you like APIs * https://developer.wordpress.org/themes/functionality/custom-front-page-templates/#is_front_page * https://wpengine.com/resources/wordpress-redirects/ Hope this helps & is not to overkill, Tom [IR8plPZ.png](https://i.imgur.com/IR8plPZ.png) [U3rPAox.png](https://i.imgur.com/U3rPAox.png) [GH6TeOJ.png](https://i.imgur.com/GH6TeOJ.png) [1ae8hu6.png](https://i.imgur.com/1ae8hu6.png) -
-
Thomas is making the right point that you do always want your domain to point to your homepage. How you "name" it depends on the platform you are using. Mine was a Wordpress question. But a traditional website used to call the homepage index.html and the browser or server knows to resolve to that for the homepage.
That's oversimplified, but the point is that it depends on the platform, but regardless of how you get there, you want your domain to go to your homepage.
-
Tom,
I appreciate your reply and attempt to help. But I'm not sure you understand what I am asking. I understand the concept of the root domain and redirect, etc well.
The primary domain, will definitely resolve to the homepage. My question is fairly Wordpress specific. When you create a new page or post you give it a title. Calling it "home" makes it easy to find on the admin side in the list of pages.
Whatever page I set as the "homepage" in the Wordpress admin settings, then the domain will resolve to that page no matter what I call it. And no one has to add the title as part of the URL or anything after the / to get there.
I could leave off the title of the page completely. It's not ideal for when I hand it off to clients. (People like things to be clearly labeled what they are.) But is that what you are suggesting I always do?
-
Is it advisable to make a different name for your homepage and still get it ranked on search Engine? I open a new blog so that is what I want to know.
Thank you.
-
Name it https://ourdomain/
I would be extremely wary of creating a subfolder for the homepage. I would name the page home in the navigation name it whatever the site name is in the title tag.
To learn more about the title tag please read here https://a-moz.groupbuyseo.org/learn/seo/title-tag
if you are thinking of re-creating your URL structure in the same manner in which you demonstrated that you strongly recommend against it.
people who understand how to navigate websites and there are very many of them will go back to the/ after .com or whatever your URL TLD is I would strongly recommend against using /home unless you are redirecting from your old site to your new site which then I would strongly recommend redirecting both .com/home & .com/ to the same homepage that is simply one "/" after the TLD or .com
I hope that helps,
Tom
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Google Not Indexing Pages (Wordpress)
Hello, recently I started noticing that google is not indexing our new pages or our new blog posts. We are simply getting a "Discovered - Currently Not Indexed" message on all new pages. When I click "Request Indexing" is takes a few days, but eventually it does get indexed and is on Google. This is very strange, as our website has been around since the late 90's and the quality of the new content is neither duplicate nor "low quality". We started noticing this happening around February. We also do not have many pages - maybe 500 maximum? I have looked at all the obvious answers (allowing for indexing, etc.), but just can't seem to pinpoint a reason why. Has anyone had this happen recently? It is getting very annoying having to manually go in and request indexing for every page and makes me think there may be some underlying issues with the website that should be fixed.
Technical SEO | | Hasanovic1 -
Homepage was removed from google and got deranked
Hello experts I have a problem. The main page of my homepage got deranked severely and now I am not sure how to get the rank back. It started when I accidentally canonicalized the main page "https://kv16.dk" to a page that did not exist. 4 months later the page got deranked, and you were not able to see the "main page" in the search results at all, not even when searching for "kv16.dk". Then we discovered the canonicalization mistake and fixed it, and were able to get the main page back in the search results when searching for "kv16.dk". At first after we made the correction, some weeks passed by, and the ranking didn't get better. Google search console recommended uploading a sitemap, do we did that. However in this sitemap there was a lot of "thin content sites", for all the wordpress attachments. E.g. for every image in an article. more exactly there were 91 of these attachment sites, and the rest of the page consists of only two pages "main page" and an extra landing page. After that google begun recommending the attachment urls in some searches. We tried fixing it by redirecting all the attachments to their simple form. E.g. if it was an attachment page for an image we redirected strait to the image. Google has not yet removed these attachment pages, so the question is if you think it will help to remove the attachments via google search console, or will that not help at all? For example when we search "kv16" an attachment URL named "birksø" is one of the first results
Technical SEO | | Christian_T0 -
Should I use a canonical URL for images uploaded to a blog post in Wordpress?
Hi, I have a wordpress website that has articles/news posts witch contain imagery. I've noticed that in the Media Library, when you upload an image to a blog post it generates a new permalink ...article-name/article-image-01.jpg I have Yoast SEO plugin and have the option to set a canonical URL for this image. Should I point it back to the actual article? Thanks for any helpers with this.
Technical SEO | | Easigrass0 -
I have a GoDaddy website and have multiple homepages
I have GoDaddy website builder and a new website http://ecuadorvisapros.com and I notices through your crawl test that there are 3 home pages http://ecuadorvisapros with a 302 temporary redirect, http://www.ecuadorvisapros.com/ with no redirect and http://www.ecuadorvisapros/home.html. GoDaddy says there is only one home page. Is this going to kill my chances of having a successful website and can this be fixed? Or can it. I actually went with the SEO version thinking it would be better, but it wants to auto change my settings that I worked so hard at with your sites help. Please keep it simple, I am a novice although I have had websites in the past I know more about the what's than the how's of websites. Thanks,
Technical SEO | | ScottR.0 -
How to force Wordpress to remove trailing slashes?
I've searched around quite a bit for a solution here, but I can't find anything. I apologize if this is too technical for the forum. I have a Wordpress site hosted on Nginx by WP Engine. Currently it resolves requests to URLs either with or without a trailing slash. So, both of these URLs are functional: <code>mysite.com/single-post</code> and <code>mysite.com/single-post/</code> I would like to remove the trailing slash from all posts, forcing mysite.com/single-post/ to redirect to mysite.com/single-post. I created a redirect rule on the server: ^/(.*)/$ -> /$1 and this worked well for end-users, but rendered the admin panel inaccessible. Somewhere, Wordpress is adding a trailing slash back on to the URL mysite.com/wp-admin, resulting in a redirect loop. I can't see anything obvious in .htaccess. Where is this rule adding a trailing slash to 'wp-admin' established? Thanks very much
Technical SEO | | james-tb0 -
Why isn't my homepage number #1 when searching my brand name?
Hi! So we recently (a month ago) lunched a new website, we have great content that updates everyday, we're active on social platforms, and we did all that's possible, at the moment, when it comes to on site optimization (a web developer will join our team this month and help us fix all the rest). When I search for our brand name all our social profiles come up first, after them we have a few inner pages from our different news sections, but our homepage is somewhere in the 2nd search page... What may be the reason for that? Is it just a matter of time or is there a problem with our homepage I'm unable to find? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Orly-PP0 -
Wordpress versus html and google ranking
My current SEO has always recommended that I take my site to wordpress. I really don't want to move to wordpress. I don't like it... I just like writing code in raw html, css, and script. I feel like I have more control that way. Wordpress just seems like a platform for blogs (I have my blog in wordpress). My question is, do wordpress websites typically rank better? Is there benefit to moving to it?
Technical SEO | | CalicoKitty20000 -
Sitefinity vs Wordpress
We're looking for a new CMS and out development company suggested Sitefinity. I've had great success with Wordpress. Is either system better. I love worpdress but have had no experience with Sitefinity. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | StandUpCubicles0