Help, I deleted the ‘home’ item in Joomla!

If you’re working on a Joomla website, it can be tempting to delete the ‘home’ menu item.  There could be many reasons why you want to do it, and I’m not going to discuss them.  The result of this deletion will be unpleasant, though:  Upon visiting your site, you and your visitors will be welcomed with an aggressive ‘404 error’. 

Sure, you could restore the deleted ‘home’ item or start to mess around in the MySQL database.  Let’s not.  A co-worker of mine found the ‘logical’ solution. 

The ‘problem’ you’re facing, is that Joomla no longer has a ‘default page’ to show to visitors upon visiting.  So, we’ve got to set a new ‘default page.

How it’s done

1. In the Joomla back-end, go to ‘menu’s’ and select the menu you deleted ‘home’ from (probably Main Menu).
2. tick the text box in front of the menu item you want to set as default. 
3. Click on ‘default’ on top of the page (the big golden star).
4. Joomla will now set the new menu item (and it’s content) as the default page; and the 404 error will be gone.