The homepage
What appears on the front page of your blog, how the sections below the feed are worked out for you, and when to take them over by hand.
On this page
Your blog's homepage is generated from your published posts and the settings below, rather than being a page you write.
What it contains
- An introduction
A short statement of what the blog is about. Worth writing: it is the first thing a reader sees and one of the few pieces of copy on the blog that is entirely yours.
- A featured post
One article at the top. By default this is simply your newest, and you can pin a specific one instead.
- Latest posts
The feed, newest first, with the featured article left out of it so it does not appear twice.
- Further sections
Up to two more, grouping posts by a category or a tag. Worked out for you by default, and covered below.
- Navigation and footer
See navigation.
Featuring
The featured slot starts on Latest, which keeps whatever you published most recently at the top with nothing for you to maintain. Switch it to a specific post when you have an article worth holding there: a blog with three genuinely good pieces is often better featuring one of those than rotating whatever went out last week.
The sections below the feed
Sections start on Automatic, which means Blogged derives them from what you have actually published rather than leaving you an empty layout to fill in.
A new blog has one section, Latest posts, because that is all a handful of articles supports. More appear as the blog grows.
- At five published posts, a second section is considered
Blogged looks at your categories first and takes the largest one, offering it as "More in" that category. Only if no category qualifies does it fall back to your largest tag, as "Explore" that tag. Either way the cluster needs at least two posts, so a section never appears with one article in it.
- At ten, a third is considered
The third deliberately reaches for a different kind of grouping from the second: a tag if the second was a category, and the other way round. It has to contribute at least two posts the second section did not already show, which is what stops two sections being the same list twice.
The theme settings tell you how far away the next one is, counting down the posts remaining rather than leaving you to guess.
Taking them over
Switch sections to Manual and you choose them yourself: which sections exist, what each is called, and what goes in each one. Blogged stops deriving anything at that point.
This is worth doing when your taxonomy does not match how you want readers to move through the blog. It is worth avoiding while the blog is small, because a hand-built layout stops growing with the content and quietly goes stale.
What the homepage measures
Homepage engagement is tracked separately from post analytics: what readers do on the front page, and which links they follow. See where the numbers come from.