Different layout on second page

Question

My homepage has 1 featured post, followed by 4 posts stacked 2 on 2, like this:

The featured post is only shown on the first page so the second page shows the older posts stacked 2 by 2 as above.

However, I'd like to be able to change the layout on the second page, showing the posts in full width and length. Any way to do this?

tl;dr = How can I make the second page look different from the first page?

Answer 1

To load override WordPress' choice of template you can use template_include filter and then use the locate_template to return the the template file path (if it finds it).

The file-name passed to locate_template must be the name of the template file name (which should be in you theme/child-theme directory).

//Loads template customtemplate.php from your theme folder on page 2+ of the 'main page'
function my_second_main_template($template){
    if (is_home() && is_paged()){
         $alternate_template = locate_template( 'customtemplate.php');
         if(!empty($alternate_template))
              $template =$alternate_template;
    }
    return $template;
}
add_filter('template_include','my_second_main_template');

Answer 2

If I understand your question correctly, I would make a separate template for home.php and a separate template for archive.php to achieve this.