Custom Page Template for “Older Posts” Pages

Question

My home page feed has a variety of items including a featured post and other features that I'd only like present on the home feed. When a user clicks on pagination to load older posts, I'd like to load up a new page template without all the home page bells and whistles. Is there a WP template file I'm overlooking or is this not supported?

Answer 1

Consider using the is_home() conditional tag to check whether or not the home page is being displayed or not.

<?php
if ( is_home() ) {
    // This is a homepage
    // Do your fancy loop here with extra bells and whistles
} else {
    // This is not a homepage (i.e. paginated page)
    // Do a stripped down version of your loop above with no bells and whistles
}
?>

Reference to is_home on the WordPress Codex