Homepage

Overview

In most cases, you’ll only need to create your homepage once. It serves as the main landing page of your website. It’s ideally the starting point where visitors can learn about your site and navigate to other sections.

Creation

The _index.md file inside the content/ folder is automatically recognized by Hugo as the homepage.
You can create it with the following command:

hugo new content --kind home _index.md

Note: If you run hugo server -D you can preview the draft demo homepage (content/_index.md) that ships with Alpha.

Layout

Home layout is intentionally empty to give you full creative control. You’re expected to build your homepage using Alpha’s shortcodes inside the _index.md file.

Note: The home layout is meant to be used exclusively with shortcodes. If you want to add plain text content, use a text-related shortcode to wrap it. (e.g. text-snippet, text-content)

Frontmatter

The homepage uses the following frontmatter if it was created with --kind home flag.

+++
draft = false
date = "2006-01-02T15:04:05-07:00"
lastmod = ""
layout = "home"

title = "Welcome to My Site"
description = ""
+++

Reference¹

draft

draft = false — (boolean, optional)

Marks the page as a draft if true.

Default: false.

date

date = "YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SSZHH:MM" — (string, recommended)

Used for SEO metadata and page ordering. Must follow ISO 8601 format.

Hugo error if misconfigured.

Default: Automatically set by Hugo at creation.

lastmod

lastmod = "" — (string, optional)

Sets the last modified date. (used in metadata).

Use the same format as date.

layout

layout = "home" — (string, optional)

Forces Hugo to use Alpha’s home layout.

title

title = "" — (string, recommended)

Populates metadata.

OCD error if omitted.

Default: Automatically filled at creation. If omitted, the site title is used.

description

description = "" — (string, recommended)

A short description for metadata.

For best SEO, keep it between 50–160 characters.

OCD warning if omitted.