How to Display Products on the Frontpage of Magento 1.x

You may have noticed by now that when you added a new product in your Magento store catalog it is not automatically displayed on your Magento website frontpage. This is because you need to specifically instruct Magento to display certain category or group of products such as those marked as "New" on the home page.

To display a category of products on your home page you need to obtain the category ID first. This can be easily done via your Magento Admin panel → Catalog → Manage Categories.

From the Categories page you can click on the desired category from the menu on the left and the Category ID will be displayed at the top of the screen. Copy this ID as you will need it latter. For example, in the screen above the default category ID is 2.

When you have the ID of the desired category, please refer to the CMS tab on the top menu and refer to the Pages section. From that page you can edit the Home page by clicking on the name of the page.

From the Menu on the left click on the Content tab and paste the following code in the editor:

{{block type="catalog/product_list" 
name="home.catalog.product.list" 
alias="products_homepage" 
category_id="2" 
template="catalog/product/list.phtml"}}

Make sure that you have input the correct category_id number in the code above.

Now you can save your page and all products in the category will be displayed on your home page. In case the changes are not displayed on your home page you should clear your Magento Cache via your System → Cache Management section.

The above steps show how to display products from certain category. There are other options as well. Here are some sample codes which you can use:

Display products labeled as NEW:

{{block type="catalog/product_new" name="home.catalog.product.new" alias="product_homepage" template="catalog/product/new.phtml"}}

Display All products:

{{block type="catalog/product_list" name="home.catalog.product.list" alias="products_homepage" template="catalog/product/list.phtml"}}