This is WordPress’s own setting, at Settings → Reading (or Customize → Homepage Settings), but it decides which of Stoat’s templates draws your front page, so it is worth knowing which is which.
Your latest posts
The front page is the listing. Everything in Customize → Archive applies to it, including the featured first post hero.
The listing has no title on the front page — a heading reading “Home” above your own front page helps nobody.
This is the right choice for a blog, and for most small news sites: the newest story is the front page, which is what a reader coming from a search engine or a newsletter expects.
A static page
Pick a Homepage and a Posts page:
- The homepage is drawn as a page — page options apply, so you can hide its title and set it to Full width, then build it out of blocks.
- The posts page is drawn as the listing, and takes the assigned page’s title as the archive heading. Name that page News, or Latest, or The Blog, and that is the heading readers see.
Two things to know about the posts page:
- Its content is ignored. WordPress does not print it, and neither does Stoat. Anything you type into it is invisible.
- Do not also add it to your menu twice — assign it here and link to it once.
Building a static homepage
Stoat has no homepage builder and no widget areas above the footer. A static homepage is built from blocks, the same as any other page:
- Cover with a heading for the masthead.
- Query Loop for a row of recent posts — Stoat styles the post title, featured image, date, terms, author, excerpt and pagination inside it to match its own archive. Featured images in a Query Loop use a single 3:2 ratio so the cards line up.
- Columns for sections.
Turn on Hide page title? and set the page to Full, and you have a blank canvas that still carries the site’s header and footer.
Posts still need somewhere to live
If you set a static homepage and no posts page, your posts have no archive at all — they exist at their own URLs and nowhere else. Category and tag archives still work, but there is no front door to everything. Assign a posts page.