---
title: "The homepage"
description: "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."
updated: "2026-08-29"
verifiedAgainst:
  - packages/shared/src/themes.ts
  - packages/shared/src/index.ts
  - apps/web/components/theme-configurator.tsx
  - apps/web/app/api/theme/config/route.ts
---

Your blog's homepage is generated from your published posts and the settings
below, rather than being a page you write.

## What it contains

<PropertyList>
  <Property name="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.
  </Property>
  <Property name="A featured post">
    One article at the top. By default this is simply your newest, and you can
    pin a specific one instead.
  </Property>
  <Property name="Latest posts">
    The feed, newest first, with the featured article left out of it so it does
    not appear twice.
  </Property>
  <Property name="Further sections">
    Up to two more, grouping posts by a category or a tag. Worked out for you by
    default, and covered below.
  </Property>
  <Property name="Navigation and footer">
    See [navigation](/blog/navigation).
  </Property>
</PropertyList>

## 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.

<Steps>
  <Step title="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.
  </Step>
  <Step title="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.
  </Step>
</Steps>

The theme settings tell you how far away the next one is, counting down the
posts remaining rather than leaving you to guess.

<Callout variant="note" title="What automatic will not do">
  Two things are excluded on purpose. The featured article is never counted into
  a section, and the `General` category is never chosen as a cluster: it is the
  fallback label for uncategorised writing, so a section built from it would
  group posts that have nothing in common. Clusters are worked out from your
  hundred most recent posts, so the homepage reflects what the blog is about now
  rather than what it was about at the start.
</Callout>

### 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](/analytics/overview).