Home Page page setting has "enable" button greyed out. Is this normal?

I just noticed, after my site has been up and running for three days, that for the HOME PAGE page settings, the enable page/disable page button is greyed out and I can't adjust this button.

Is this normal, or did I do something to cause this?

Thank you for any help you can offer,

Jenny

Yes it is. If you made a different page the home page then those controls that are greyed out on the current home page become active again. 

Thank you so much Derrick! I just didn't know and it was worrying.

have a great day!

Jenny

My home page wont enable - even though its the only homepage I have set AND I only have 15 pages - anyone got any advice?

@pixelloproductionsdid you figure this out? i'm struggling with that exact thing right now! & squarespace's chat is closed for the holiday (good for them, bad for me) & i'm really struggling to figure it out

@DaleC

I'm unable to reproduce the issue on my test site but here is what I would try to fix the issue.

Create a new page in NOT LINKED area.

Set it as the Home page.

Go to your former home page and see if you can enable it.

Set the former home page back to the home page.

Let us know how it goes.

If a home page isn't enabled, if you don't have one,  then your domain will usuallly recieve a 404 error when someone goes to it. If that doesn't happen and the home page says disabled, it is actually working. Index pages cannot be  disabled unless all the secions are moved out or deleted first so that slider will be grayed out. 

I just encountered this issue and chatted with Squarespace help. The solution ended up being this:

1. Set a different page as your home page
2. Go back to the disabled page and enable it (the toggle shouldn't be greyed out anymore, now that the page isn't set as your homepage)
3. Reset that page as your home page.

what i realized and i don't see explicitly mentioned above is that the Enable button on Home is greyed out because we cannot disable Home - as soon as you set any page as Home, the Enable button becomes greyed out for that page

Each time I create a new blank page under "Not Linked" or in the linked area, then set it as my homepage, then go back to my previous homepage, it's automatically set as "enabled".  As soon as I reset this previous homepage back to being my current homepage, it automatically grays out and is disabled no matter what.  So creating a  new blank page as a temp homepage doesn't seem to fix whatever page I set as my homepage to go from disabled to enabled.  I guess I have to assume that my home page will always stay disabled no matter what. I do know my homepage is accessible externally to visitors, however, I'm concerned about search engines not being able to access it!  I can't seem to find an answer on what can be done about it.  Can anyone else help with this issue?

@AnneMitchell has the answer. The home page enabled toggle is always greyed out because you have no option to disable. You'll also note that it is in the enabled position.

Ok, I get you what you mean.  It's toggled to the right (the on position) but says "Enable" in gray.  However, the help info in Squarespace is contradicting then.  It states that the little house that shows up next your home page in the left panel should be black if it's enabled and if it's gray it's disabled.  Mine is gray, with the settings showing as grayed out switched to the right as "enable".  See attachment example with copy of Squarespace information copied and pasted.

1 hour ago, minisLNO said:

However, the help info in Squarespace is contradicting then.

It appears the SS docs are out of date.

Hey Creedon, I like the way you logically work through issues on this board and so I thought I would come to you with my own version of "grayed out" home page settings.

I am an SEO consultant and have been since 2001. You would think I would know how to get around this stuff...LOL. But in this instance, it is my son's site that has the issue, not mine.

Originally, he (unwittingly) set his home page as /home. But then a couple of months later he changed the URL to just /. This of course created a duplicate content dilemma, with two different URLs pointing to the home page. 

I stepped in at this point and did a 301 redirect i.e. /home -> /

On my iPhone, when I check the redirect to see if it is working, it appears to be working fine. But on my laptop, it still allows the two different URLs to bring up the home page. I tested it out on a different computer that had never previously searched for this site... and the redirect didn't work -- it brought up both versions (separately) of the home page URL.

Anyway, that is only ONE of three problems. The second is that /home is showing in the xml sitemap, not /. That is a "NO NO" with Google and so I am hoping that you might have a workaround or a fix for both these issues. 

Thirdly, the dreaded "greyed out" home page thing: My son's home page settings are greyed out - for the URL/home (and there is no sign of any alternate home page in the pages area, even though both versions of the home page URL fetch the home page. 

The URL Slug show up as Home/ (see below) and the Navigation Title reads Home -- even though I personally reworked the Meta Title to read something quite different (in the SEO section of Squarespace).

Apparently, according to my data on SEMrush, /home is the canonical version (or one of two canonical versions even?). Either way, it should NOT BE the canonical, and I do not know how to fix that because it is my understanding (which is quite likely incorrect) that Squarespace assigns canonicals automatically and/or I don't have access to the snippet of code in the <head>.

The bottom line is that I simply want to remove all traces of /home and only have /.

28 minutes ago, Optisearchpro said:

Originally, he (unwittingly) set his home page as /home. But then a couple of months later he changed the URL to just /.

Squarespace does not allow you to create a page without something in the URL SLUG field.

Even though the UI allows you to remove the text of the field and "SAVE", SS silently inserts a value of it's own so the field is not left empty.

Quote

This of course created a duplicate content dilemma, with two different URLs pointing to the home page.

All SS sites have two home pages. One at / and one at the URL SLUG assigned to the page. In many cases /home

Quote

I stepped in at this point and did a 301 redirect i.e. /home -> /

SS's URL Mappings feature does not work with URLs that exist on the site. I assume the logic SS uses is:

• if the URL SLUG exists as a page on the site, present the page
• if the URL SLUG does not exist as a page on the site, check for a URL Mapping and redirect

I don't have any solutions but just some observations about how things work.

Thanks for getting back to me, Creedon. I was actually in the process of updating the post (editing it and adding more content) when you responded to it. See above.

I'm mystified by SS's lack of foresight when it comes to duplicate content issues re the home page though. That has always been -- and no doubt, always will be -- a priority error to be fixed (as per alerts in Google Search Console etc.)

On 3/11/2024 at 6:29 PM, Optisearchpro said:

there is no sign of any alternate home page in the pages area, even though both versions of the home page URL fetch the home page.

There is no / page in Pages. SS is most likely using a feature similar to an HTTP server's rewrite rule which allows / to serve up the content from /home without the URL changing.

Now THAT would make sense. I guess this website is just going to have to live with the "pseudo" home page canonical issue (in that /home is deemed to be the canonical) and that two versions of the home page are detected by every SEO tool in town...LOL. Once again, thank you for what has been a most interesting and insightful discussion. I've learned a lot from you. 

I have the same issue and was alerted by Google console. So this is a problem. Is there an actual solution?