Why Your Website Shows an Old or Wrong Homepage (Index File Priority Explained)

If your website shows an old 'coming soon' page, a default hosting welcome page, or an outdated homepage even after you've installed a new site, the cause is almost always a leftover index.html file sitting in the same folder as your real site. Web servers follow a set priority when deciding which file to load as your homepage, and an old index.html usually wins over your actual index.php file. This is especially common right after installing WordPress or another app with Softaculous, since a placeholder file from before the install can still be in the folder.

Why This Happens

When someone visits your domain without typing a specific file name, the server looks inside your website's folder for a default page to load. By default, it checks for files in this order: index.html first, then index.htm, then index.php.

So if your folder contains both an old index.html (maybe a default welcome page, or a static placeholder you uploaded before building the real site) and your new index.php from WordPress or another app, the index.html loads instead, no matter how new or correct your index.php is.

How to Check Which File Is Causing It

1. Log in to your hosting control panel (cPanel or DirectAdmin) and open File Manager.
2. Navigate to public_html (or the specific folder for the domain or subdomain showing the wrong page).
3. Look for more than one file starting with "index": for example index.html and index.php in the same folder.
4. If both exist, the index.html is almost certainly the one being served.

How to Fix It

1. In File Manager, select the old index.html file.
2. Choose Rename and change it to something like index-old.html, rather than deleting it outright. This keeps it as a backup in case you still need the content.
3. Reload your website in the browser to confirm your real homepage now appears.

Rename the old file instead of deleting it first. Once you've confirmed everything works correctly, you can safely delete it later if you're sure you don't need it.

File Manager works the same way in both cPanel and DirectAdmin for this fix: the steps above apply whichever panel you have.

Still Seeing the Old Page?

If you've removed the old index.html and your browser still shows the outdated page, your browser is likely showing a cached copy rather than the live page. Clear your browser cache and reload the page to see the change.

If the problem is specific to a subdomain or an addon domain, double-check that you're editing the index files inside that subdomain's own folder rather than your main public_html folder, since each subdomain typically has its own separate folder and its own index file.