I actually want a BLANK homepage for my WP site

How do I achieve a completely blank homepage in Wordpress?

[LightlyScorched]

Is there a Wordpress theme that literally has an option that will let me have a completely blank page as my homepage? I do need to have interior pages - I am just building custom landing pages to use in various funnels/campaigns for an assortment of websites. The site is not for the public or anyone else to use, so the homepage can be blank or just the logo of the site. I don't want any theme credit to show or any other information. I literally can't find a theme with little enough on the homepage.

This seems like an absurd question, since back when I started programming websites, we did it in Notepad, and achieving a blank homepage was the easiest darned thing ever to do. However, these days, with Wordpress themes, I can't seem to get rid of everything on any theme. I could overwrite the index.html using the file manager, but really, I don't want to have to do that. I still want to use Wordpress because I want the utility plugins in use.

Thanks for reading. :)

[not2easy]

Hello LightlyScorched and welcome to the forums! Unfortunately WP is pretty much created for promoting its content. It can have a blank front page but the framework is a little more trouble to tweak to blankness. Most themes offer a full page template to do away with the sidebar and you can always choose to have a static front page that is nothing but a logo or even "nothing". The footers can be edited to remove all text, even if you only read html.

If the background efforts expect to be found in the serps it gets difficult. If you create no menus there can be no navigation. It is entirely possible to css your way to a single color theme but you would probably need to set it to no-index.

If this is your first WP effort, you will want to spend time reading at the WP .org site to learn how to manage all the features and options before getting started.

[LightlyScorched]

Thank you for your response! I'm actually an old webmaster. This is not my freshman effort with Wordpress but I'm not yet fluent in CSS and I found it interesting that I couldn't remove everything from a theme/front page, even for the simplest of themes. Really the entire website will be in use, but it'll all be landing funnels that traffic is sent to - they will be redirected after entering their email address. The traffic won't ever need the homepage. We aren't open to the public, so I don't want people to sign up and they don't need to know anything about what we do - it's internal. That's why I want it to be blank! I don't mind noindex because I don't want search engine traffic. This is probably the weirdest Wordpress need I've had so far, haha! I'll let you know how it goes.

[Nutter]

Could you add an empty home.php file to your theme folder? [developer.wordpress.org...]

Haven't tried it, but that seems like it should work. If you wanted, you could probably throw a logo in there.

[lucy24]

I know where you're coming from. For a number of years my personal site didn't have a home page. That is, there was a page called /index.html that included links to the places people would actually go to, but it was just to prevent errors when a human goes to / (site root) manually after landing on an interior page, as some people will do. Several years went by before I spent so much as five seconds making a page that looked different from a 404 page.

Since you don't expect humans to see your home page at all, does it really matter if WP throws out a generic page? Turn off all possible options, sure. If they insist on text, type in a few lines of Lorem ipsum (or, if you want to be fancy, Quousque tandem). If it makes them happy to put up a banner, it's really no skin off your nose.

:: detour to Wayback Machine to refresh memory ::

Haha. The first captured version says, quote, “This is a brand-new site. In time, everything will link here” and then plain-text links to a couple of subdirectories. It continued saying this for the next two and a half years, at which point I added some rudimentary icons.

[LightlyScorched]

Thanks for the replies, Nutter and lucy24!

Nutter, I may end up doing just that! That's what I meant in the OP when I said index.html. I'm not used to the homepage being home.php, haha! I am about to refresh my webmaster skills with a year-long certificate in eCommerce. Can't wait.

I don't feel like such a weirdo knowing that someone else had a site that didn't need a home page, only the inner workings of the site. The pages I create will never need to have links from the home page to them. I'll play with it some more and see if I can come up with a completely blank page with no menu and just a logo. If not, a blank home.php it is...

[ergophobe]

Also, you could install your Wordpress in a subdirectory and have index.html be blank.

So all your URLs in the case would be /subdir/mypage

But you could avoid that with a rewrite (not a redirect) and anything that comes in that is more than the domain name with or without a slash gets rewritten, so /mypage gets rewritten to /subdir/mypage.

Then you don't have to mess with special WP templates or incur a WP page load just to serve a logo.