How to change the home page in Joomla!

If you are wondering how to change the main page that your domain points to, start here...

We are asked this question a lot when people are first learning Joomla!

The default menu item in Joomla! dictates the page or component that your website points to. By default, when Joomla is installed, a main menu item is created linking to the frontpage component. This is a component in Joomla that presents the beginning of selected articles (up to the read more break), in a blog format.

However you may want to domain's first page (i.e. when you go to www.yourdomain.com) to link to another component or another page.

In the backend of Joomla [yourdomain.com/administrator], navigate to menu (top left) and select the menu with the *asterix - this is the default menu

When you view that menu, you will see a star in the default column next to one of the menu items - each entry or link in a menu is called a menu item

You can either
- select an alternative menu item and make it default - select menu item using check box on left and assign default by clicking default button (top right)
or
- select the menu item that is assigned to be default and change it to link to the page or component that you would like your website to firstly point to