How To Create A Custom Menu Link To The Blog Index In WordPress

It seems easy enough, create a custom menu link to the blog index in WordPress. Why couldn’t I figure this out?

I wanted a menu item to point back to my home page, the page that contained the index of all my blog posts. Turns out I was making this much more difficult then it needed to be, and it was easily solved using the standard Menu option in the Appearance menu.

My Situation

I had a blog that was in use for a while, and it was originally set up to be just a blog with no menu items. I had set my Reading settings so that the front page of my blog displayed my latest posts (no static page). When a reader went to my site, they saw the blog index page.

I recently made some changes, to add a menu that would display some additional information related to the site. Easy enough. The problem was, I didn’t want the blog content to be displayed on a separate blog page that needed to be accessed from a navigation menu, I wanted to keep it on the “home page”, just as it always was.

Lets look at an example to clarify.

When you create a menu item, say for an About Page, you first must create a Page in WordPress that contains the content for your About Page. You then create a menu item that points to that new Page, and when someone views that page, the URL looks something like this:

www.yoursite.com/about/

Now I had my menu item defined, with links to the new pages. The problem was, I couldn’t figure out a way to create a menu item for home page, my blog index. As I stated previously, I wanted to maintain my initial blog structure, so all my posts would still show at:

www.yoursite.com/

Not at:

www.yoursite.com/blog/

Create A Custom Menu Link To The Blog Index

The point that I was over complicating was that you don’t need to have a WordPress Page defined for every menu item that you want to create! You can easily create a custom link to add to your menu, that points to any URL that you desire.

All of this can be defined in the Appearance – Menus option. Once you have your menu defined that links to the Page(s) on your site, you need to set up a custom link that points to your blog index (your home page).

1. Select Appearance – Menus from the WordPress options
2. Select the Links Drop Down on the left side of the page
3. In the URL Field, add your main site (www.yoursite.com/)
4. In the Name Field, add the menu item you want to reference the above URL (call it Home or Blog).
5. Select the Add To Menu option

No need to define a Page that links to the menu. Probably a no-brainer for most WordPress user’s, but none the less, I thought this might help someone who was wondering how to create a custom menu link to the blog index.