How do I get rid of the "Welcome to your new Drupal website" on the front page?

Last updated April 14, 2011. Created by brenda003 on May 1, 2006.
Edited by silverwing, bertboerland, dman, bryan kennedy. Log in to edit this page.

If you are seeing this message, it is because your front page is set to 'node' and you have no content promoted to the front page.

To fix this, you either need to (1) promote something or (2) change your front page, or (3) add an url alias.

1. # Edit a node (or create a new node) and click the arrow next to "Publishing Options" to expand that section. There is a checkbox labled "Promoted to front page". If you check that and (re)submit the node it will show up on the front page and the welcome message will disappear.
2. # By default, the front page of your site is 'node', which is a list of all nodes that have been promoted to the front page as explained in (1). If you don't like this, you can change your front page to any page you like.
   • In Drupal 4.7, go to www.example.com/admin/settings and click on "General settings" to expand that section
   • In 5.x and 6.x, go to www.example.com/admin/settings/site-information

   Towards the bottom, you will see 'Default front page'. If it's still at the default, it will be 'node'. Change this to the page you would like to be your front page. That is, the page that loads when you go to www.example.com. For example, if you want people to go straight to the blogs, you would put 'blog' in that setting, or you could set it to a specific node or view.

3. # If you rely on a custom front page like in (2), and that you don't use nor need to have nodes promoted to the front page, you can still see the welcome message when visiting www.example.com/node. Moreover, it will be indexed by search engines. While you can prevent it from being indexed by editing the robots.txt file, or add a redirect in your .htaccess, you can also do it directly in Drupal by adding an alias (provided you have the Path module enabled). To do so, go to www.example.com/admin/build/path/add and fill out the fields. For the "Existing system path", you can enter the path to your custom front page or any other page, and for "Path alias", enter "node". By typing www.example.com/node you will then land on the page you defined instead of seeing the welcome message.

The welcome message is hard coded into Drupal's core files so it is not possible to have your front page set to 'node', have no alias, have no nodes promoted, and not have this message without changing the source code.

Anonymous users can see the welcome page
If you are having problems with anonymous users seeing the "Welcome to your new Drupal website" page, then you are likely experiencing problems with a contributed node access module. For troubleshooting, visit, Why is my "Welcome to your new Drupal website" visible to anonymous users?

Change the front page through the theme #

From a tip by garcia
A simple way to change what displays on the front page without installing modules:
In your themes page.tpl, change the line

and replace it with

This prevents the "front" page from displaying the any of the content that would normally show there. You can have your frontpage free from the default welcome message of "River of News" but with all the other things.

You can get a similar result by using the theme system template override filenames to create an entirely different front page template

Modules to help #

Front.module can be installed to give you lots more control over the front page.
Panels.module is also often used to create a front page made up of different configurable sections.
Unwelcome.module will remove the default front-page content and works without any core code hacks or theme alterations.