How to make an external Wordpress Main Page? - php

Question

Actually I am running a Wordpress website with a simple template.
Now for SEO and Speed optimization purposes I would like to make a custom HTML page super simple and well optimized but that is not part of the Wordpress structure.
Basically, my own HTML page.
How can I have my Wordpress thinking the main page is that HTML created page as Main page and the rest of the website managed by the Wordpress ?

Answer 1

My answer requires an Apache or Litespeed server (and possibly others) with mod rewrite enabled, and where AllowOverride has not limited your use of .htaccess file.
See: https://codex.wordpress.org/htaccess#General_Examples
According to the WordPress documentation on that page, if you are using an .htaccess file to handle "pretty permalinks", then it creates and uses the following basic .htaccess file:
# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>
# END WordPress
What this code does is redirect all requests that are not for an actual file or directory to the index.php file. You can modify this easily and achieve what you want. Simply changing it to something like this:
# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /wp_index.php [L]
</IfModule>
# END WordPress
That change would redirect all requests to wp_index.php instead of index.php. So you would make that change, and then rename your index.php file to wp_index.php.
Once that is done, you can create a new index.php file and its contents can be plain HTML. Don't worry about the .php file extension. When somebody goes to your website, if they go to your homepage, the server will serve up the index.php file. For all other requests the server will use wp_index.php and WordPress will handle the request.
Please keep in mind that there are some differences in how .htaccess files work, depending on your server. If my changes don't immediately work, tweaking the .htaccess file contents may be necessary.