Custome home page url

Question

First of all: this is not at all how websites behave. The standard is that you have some kind of homepage on the root URL /.

Now WordPress is customizable and I was able to achieve what you want – at least in most ways.

// used to generate the link
add_filter('page_link', 'WPSE_1805_page_link', 10, 3);
function WPSE_1805_page_link($link, $post_id, $sample) {
    // if link for any page other than home was requested, return early
    if ($link !== home_url("https://wordpress.stackexchange.com/"))
        return $link;

    // otherwise, return page link with slug
    return _get_page_link($post_id);
}

// don't redirect /slug to / for homepage
add_filter('redirect_canonical', 'WPSE_1805_redirect_canonical', 10, 2);
function WPSE_1805_redirect_canonical($redirect_url, $requested_url) {
    $home = get_page_link(get_option('page_on_front'));

    // if home was requested, return requested URL
    if ($requested_url === $home)
        return $requested_url;

    return $redirect_url;
}

Most necessary functions are within wp-includes/link-template.php where I found these hooks.

page_link is necessary, so /foo doesn’t get rewritten to / just because it is the front page (when creating/getting page links, e.g. via get_permalink()).

redirect_canonical you need, so when a visitor comes to /foo, they do not get redirected to /.

With this, visitors can still go to / and will see the content from the selected static front page (although the canonical link will be set to /foo, so search engines should list that link instead).

To disable this, or better said redirect visitors, you can use the following

add_action('template_redirect', 'WPSE_1805_template_redirect');
function WPSE_1805_template_redirect() {
    global $wp;

    // get requested URL
    $current_url = home_url( $wp->request );
    // if requested URL is root or root with ending slash
    if ($current_url === home_url('') || $current_url === home_url("https://wordpress.stackexchange.com/")) {
        wp_redirect( get_page_link(get_option('page_on_front')), 301 );
        exit;
    }
}

Even with this, you will still have links going to /, simply because theme authors may use home_url("https://wordpress.stackexchange.com/") in their code. You could filter that, but my other code would need to be rewritten, because it too uses this function.

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