How do make Wordpress to let alone my static home page?

Question

I want to install wordpress in the root of an existing site, and temporarily use my new installation home as /home, while the rest of the static site is still there find-able by visitors/google.

I don't know how to "tell" wordpress to stop trying to handle/capture/mess with the root main page (rewrite rules? .htaccess redirection?, custom template?)

Answer 1

Unless I misunderstood you, you don't have to do anything at all. WordPress .htaccess rules should ignore any special handling of files that exist on the server, therefor your static files at the root should be served just fine.

Answer 2

if you want to show the static page as the home page instead of the wordpress index.php then you just delete the .htaccess of wordpress. Otherwise everything will be redirected to the wordpress homepage only. Try it out.

Answer 3

I'm not sure if I understand you correctly, but: if what you actually want to do is keep your existing site running while you build the new one in WordPress, away from prying eyes, you might want to look at the Maintenance Mode plugin. You can move your current "default page" to something like home.html (or home.php or whatever) and create a 503.php error page in your theme that simply redirects to that page. Then you will be able to privately access the WordPress site (logged in only) while the rest of the site continues to function.