This is the setup tutorial for the Modern Homepage, which is available exclusively through the Feast Plugin.
We have some companion pages to help understand what makes the Modern Homepage different from the theme homepage, but these are not necessary to implement it:
- the modern homepage vs. theme homepage details the differences between the modern homepage and theme homepage
- the rethinking the homepage post outlines the issues we discovered with the theme homepage
- the modern homepage showcase page shows some before-and-after results for sites that have made the switch
- the modern homepage styling guide offers different styling options, unrelated to the theme styling
This tutorial makes use of two new blocks we released in June 2020:
- the Simple Recipe Index (FSRI) block, which displays an image+title of your posts
- the Simple Category Index (FSCI) block, which displays an image+title of your categories
- note that the FSCI block requires additional setup steps before using, and are an "enhancement" to the Modern Homepage
Follow the steps below to get the homepage setup:
Jump to:
- New sites
- 1. Create the page
- 2. Import the homepage template
- 3. Edit the page title
- 4. Edit the intro
- 5. Trending recipes
- 6. Search
- 7. Edit category #1
- 8. Edit category #2
- 9. Edit the user profile block
- 10. Add another category
- 11. Recent recipes
- 12. Recently updated
- 13. Set your featured image
- 14. Disable social widgets
- 15. Disable comments
- 16. Yoast settings
- 17. Set the homepage live
- Enhancement: styling guide
- Enhancement: Link to your categories
- Optional: Full width Modern Homepage
- White Glove Conversion
- Things you should know
- Unique content
- 💬 Comments
New sites
For sites that have a low amount of content (less than 20 recipes): you can skip this entire tutorial and simply display your 20 most recent posts.
Just insert an FSRI block and set the limit to 20:
The full Modern Homepage setup will not benefit you until you have enough content to break into proper categories. Come back to this once you're getting traffic or feel like you need to rebuild the homepage.
See: how to launch your food blog.
1. Create the page
Create a new page using the block editor, name it "Modern Homepage" and set it to "Visibility: Private"
2. Import the homepage template
Grab the code for the Modern Homepage template here.
3. Edit the page title
We recommend using your site tagline as the homepage h1. To do this, simply click on the post title and edit it.
See this guide on page titles from Google for more information.
4. Edit the intro
Following the site tagline, you should have a 2-3 sentence intro that explains what types of recipes you specialize in and what people love about your site.
5. Trending recipes
Linking to your top-trafficked posts reinforces their importance to Google, helping them rank, using the FSRI block.
Use this tutorial on finding your top 8 trending recipes and insert them into the "ID" section of the FSRI block.
The post ID can be found in the admin bar on the individual post when visiting that page:
6. Search
The search block is included with the Modern Homepage template and requires no action. Styling included in the Modern Homepage removes the heading and button, and this is perfectly fine for SEO and accessibility.
7. Edit category #1
Update the heading, description and FSRI block, and category link to point to the first category you want to feature.
Note: the FSRI block uses the category slug, not the category name.
8. Edit category #2
Update the heading, description and FSRI block, and category link to point to the second category you want to feature.
9. Edit the user profile block
The about section uses the User Profile Block.
Be sure to change the image, heading, description and link.
10. Add another category
Remove the paragraph below the user profile block and practice inserting your own heading, paragraph, FSRI block and paragraph with category link below the user profile block.
11. Recent recipes
For sites with high volumes of social media or email subscribers, the "recent recipes" section can be moved up higher on the page. This is because returning users may be landing on the homepage looking for the newest recipes
For sites that are primarily search engine and Pinterest driven, your recent recipes generally aren't the most relevant or timely content, and this section should stay here.
Nothing needs to be done in this section.
12. Recently updated
Having a "recently updated" section on your homepage helps to give those updated posts a little search engine boost, so that content can be recrawled and pushed up in search rankings.
Nothing needs to be done in this section.
13. Set your featured image
We recommend setting the featured image for this page as your logo at 1200x1200 resolution. This gets pulled for the featured image by social networks like Facebook when you share your homepage. See: image optimization for Facebook.
Follow this tutorial to set your default featured image.
14. Disable social widgets
You don't need people sharing the homepage, and social widgets can slow page rendering.
If running Social Pug (Grow), scroll to the bottom of the block editor and disable it in their settings.
15. Disable comments
You shouldn't need people commenting on the homepage.
16. Yoast settings
Configure the Yoast meta boxes at the bottom of the page using:
- your site tagline as the SEO title
- your homepage intro as the Meta description
Once done, this will look similar to:
17. Set the homepage live
Once you're happy with the homepage, you can set the visibility to public:
Then go to Admin > Settings > Reading and set the Your homepage displays to a static page and choose the name of your homepage (site tagline)
Finally, go to Appearances > Widgets and empty the Homepage: Above, Homepage: Middle and Homepage: Bottom widget areas.
Your homepage should then be live:
Note: after setting the homepage live, do not set it back to private. It needs to remain public.
Enhancement: styling guide
The Modern Homepage can be styled many different ways, without needing to update your theme.
See the Modern Homepage Styling Guide for the video tutorial on applying custom styling.
Enhancement: Link to your categories
We recommend inserting the Simple Category Index (FSCI) block below the "Trending Recipes" section.
Link to your top 4-8 categories to give an internal link boost to them, and the posts they contain.
For more than 8 categories, we recommend converting the theme's recipe index to the Modern Recipe Index.
Optional: Full width Modern Homepage
You can now convert to the Full Width Modern Homepage if you'd prefer that layout.
There are not SEO, pagespeed or usability benefits to this, it's entirely personal preference. This can be undone at any point.
White Glove Conversion
The Modern Homepage White Glove conversion service is available for anyone who doesn't have the time to tackle this personally, or would prefer not to.
Things you should know
The Modern Homepage is designed with based on best practices we've seen from high performing sites.
We moved the homepage to the block editor because of the amount of customization you can make to it, which is a good thing, but can also be bad if you don't know what you're doing.
Here's the principles behind the homepage:
- your homepage is the most important page on your site for internal linking and is the basis for your site structure
- content and links at the top of the page have what is known as "prominence", which means that users and search engines believe it's the most important - keep your site's introduction and trending/top posts at the top
- posts that are shown on the homepage get extra "link juice" and will rank better than posts not on the homepage
- do not overstuff your homepage by trying to fit everything on it - we recommend keeping it less than 40 links to posts and categories
- having too much on the homepage can cause a "too many DOM nodes" issue in pagespeed insights and will cause pagespeed issues
- to reinforce your site structure, we recommend converting the theme's recipe index to the Modern Recipe Index
- the headings on the Modern Homepage are important, as they provide landmarks for screen readers to navigate, and are important for search engines, see the Modern Guidelines for Page Headings
- the unique content in the paragraphs provide context for your readers, and additional information about your site to search engines, and are important to include
Unique content
We've had enough questions about the site title + intro paragraphs that this bears repeating: it's necessary.
Some people feels this "detracts" from the homepage or that it's too much of a change, and unfortunately that's simply not important.
When it comes to optimizing the homepage, check your ego at the door.
Your homepage is possibly the most important page on your site, and the content there tells Google (and site visitors) what the entire content of your website is about.
Not having any unique content, or not having enough, is a problem.
This is very simple:
- The page title (h1) should be your Yoast page title
- The intro paragraph should be your Yoast page description
- The 1-2 sentence sentence explanation for each category displayed with FSRI blocks should explain why this lives on your page and the idea behind the category
- Imagine a blind person has landed on your site and the only information they're aware of, is what is in the page content (no headers, no sidebar, no footer, no images) - do they understand what you're about?
You want to at least mention the keywords your site/categories/posts rank for, but don't try to optimize this page at all. That's not the purpose here.
Focus on providing context, and a little teaser for your readers to dive deeper into the site.
Urvashi Pitre says
Hi thanks so much for this. Many of us have both categories and custom taxonomies that we use to categorize recipes. So far, your updated recipe index, and now your home page make no provisions for displaying these taxonomies. Is there either a workaround, or a roadmap to make this functionality available?
Skylar Bowker says
Custom taxonomies, much like custom post types and custom templates, are a customization that introduces tons of unnecessary complexity. They're extremely technically advanced, and would cause more problems than they're worth for our average user.
There are simply far more important things to focus on that actually provide tangible benefits. The post content is priority #1, #2 and #3 and there's a long way to go before this is optimized.
At this time, we have no intention of supporting custom taxonomies. Our philosophy is K.I.S.S.: https://feastdesignco.com/principles-best-practices/
If you're at the stage where you require this extent of customization, I would recommend hiring an in-house developer.
The Crooked Carrot says
Thank you thank you thank you. These updates are what I've been waiting for and I'm thrilled to be able to customize our homepage (and have it be more mobile friendly)! I've already been updating our homepage per your instructions above and I'm thrilled. Thank you!
Ryan says
Are you recommending changing the sidebar as well? For example I have my about me in the sidebar as well as popular recipes.
Skylar Bowker says
Great question! At this time, no. The sidebar is used on every other page on the site and the about and popular recipes should appear on those.
You can exclude the about from the homepage if you'd like.
We'll release an alternate guide down the road for creating a full-width homepage (no sidebar) but this will need more testing with regards to the image sizes and widths.
Tammy Spencer says
Is there a way to have the fsri point to a page rather than a category?
Skylar Bowker says
Yes! We've added this to the tutorial:
[fsri post_type="page" id="111,222,333"]
Replacing the ids with the page ID.
Jane Saunders says
Hey Skylar, just setting up my new homemage. Say you have 8 posts in a category, but only want to display 4 on your homepage at any one time I'm wondering if there's a way to make it random which 4 out of the 8 are selected? From what I'm reading they are set to default to display most recently published/ updated? Correct me if I'm wrong.
Skylar Bowker says
Generally, you want the links being displayed to be consistent. Google uses an "average" of the last 10-20 page crawls to determine what's actual permanent content on your homepage, and what isn't.
Randomly displaying posts would eliminate the "authority" being passed to any posts being displayed.
You CAN set the orderby parameter to change which posts are preferentially displayed. Two good options would be orderby="modified" or orderby="comment_count"
Whitney Bond says
Can you enable the modern homepage if you're not using the block editor?
Skylar Bowker says
In theory, you could. But we haven't tested it, wouldn't recommend it, and wouldn't support it.
The block editor can be enabled on a post by post basis. You don't have to use it on your entire site just because you use it for one page.
See: block editor tutorials
Tammy says
Thank you so much for making this easier than before! I really appreciate your work on it. I've got the basic set up done and look forward to making some customization.
Travis Tharp says
Hi Skylar. I am trying to add ads to the homepage in the middle of the page. Is there something I can do to insert an ad space in the middle of the page?
Skylar says
You'll want to ask your ad company if there's some HTML snippet you need to insert, or whatever their instructions are.
Kara Myers says
This tutorial was insanely helpful! I really appreciate it. As someone who hates doing the tech stuff, you made it super simple. Just wanted to quickly mention that the video shown under 17. Set The Homepage Live is the wrong one. It's showing the social sharing video again. Thank you so much for putting this tutorial together!
Skylar says
Thanks for catching that! The video has been updated.
Amy Treasure says
Hi Skylar, I originally made my modern homepage using the shortcode. Do I need to do over using blocks instead, asper this tutorial? My host updated to WP 5.5 automatically (have asked them to stop auto updates now) I reverted to my back up but my homepage isn't pulling recently published posts and I wondered if something went screwy with the WP update and revert? Thanks so much, Amy
Skylar says
Thanks for asking! We have a shortcode-to-block conversion video tutorial at https://feastdesignco.com/fsri-block/#conversion-video
You'd have to submit a support ticket for troubleshooting that specific issue.
Eloise Jennes says
I just switched to the modern homepage and I love it!!! So versatile and easy to use!
I do have 2 questions:
1) Which CSS code should I use if I want the search label (above the search bar) to be visible and the search button to be visible as well, but still in line with the search bar?
2) And is there a CSS code I could apply to insert some white space between the menu and the H1 title on the modern homepage?
Thank you so much! Elo
Skylar says
Great to hear Elo!
1) We haven't provided any styling for the search label and wouldn't provide support for this - you would just remove the CSS code snippet we included to hide this off screen
2) You can follow this tutorial to learn how to do this: https://feastdesignco.com/how-to/use-inspect-element-troubleshoot/
Adam Morgan says
For the user profile block on the modern homepage, what dimensions should the image be?
Skylar says
By default it uses a 1fr/2fr layout (33%/66%) and with the Full Width, you'd be looking at 1140px / 3 = 380px - so round up to 400 to be safe. If you need a retina quality display on desktop (not really) you'd want to upload at 800px. Personally, I'd stick with 400x400px and let the Modern Thumbnails generate the required 180px/360px variations.