How to Customize Your Substack's Homepage

Make your publication's homepage look unique, and help your readers find their way around

Hi there,

This post is about customizing the homepage of your Substack publication.

How to access site design customizations

Access the design features from the settings section of your publication dashboard.

Publication dashboard > Settings > Branding > Publication theme > Edit Theme [button] > Homepage

Before you start

These features come with a warning (from me):

While it’s nice to have a good-looking online publication, it is not as critical as you might think when you are first starting out. In fact, most new online creators spend way too much time and effort worrying about the design aesthetics of their online spaces — time that should be spent creating high-quality content for their subscribers.

Don’t let the customization options become ‘busy-work’ procrastination for you!

Customization features explained

I just posted an article that explains the details of Substack customization on Medium. It includes

• an explanation of the ‘hero post’ options;

• how to pin posts;

• how top posts are chosen;

• how color and font choices appear in web versus email.

Find the instructions in my article on Medium

You can find the article here: https://karen-cherry.medium.com/how-to-customize-your-substack-publication-35c80b2a02e9

Why I cross-post to Medium

I send you links to Medium articles instead of reposting the content to Substack for two reasons:

• SEO. If I post the same content in two places without adding canonical references, search engines have to figure out which article to serve up. Substack doesn’t have a canonical link option, and Medium does.

• Respecting your inbox. For people who follow and subscribe to me on Medium (thank you!), I don’t want you to get the exact same stuff from me twice in the same week.

Thanks for being part of this Substack community,

Have an excellent week.

Karen