Website structure[edit]
The majority of websites have a home page with underlying content pages, although some websites contain only a single page.[6]

The uniform resource locator (URL) of a home page is most often of the form http://domain.tld/index.htm or http://domain.tld/default.htm, where "tld" refers to the top-level domain used by the website.[7] However, if the /index.htm or /default.htm is omitted, the server will still serve the page.[7] For example, http://www.example.com and http://www.example.com/index.html both refer to the example.com home page. The index.htm file is kept in the highest level of the directory the server is configured to serve.

If an index.htm home page has not been created for a web site, many web servers will default to display a list of files located in the site's directory, if the security settings of the directory permit.[8] This list will include hyperlinks to the files, allowing for simple file sharing without maintaining a separate index file.

History of home pages[edit]
In the early days of the World Wide Web in the first half of the 1990s, an important part of Web pages belonged to students or teachers with a UNIX account in their university. System administrators of such systems installed an HTTP server pointing its root directory to the directory containing the users accounts. On UNIX, the base directory of an account is called "home", and the HOME environment variable contains its path (for example /home/nom_de_login). The URL of the home page is usually has the format http://departement.universite.edu/~nom_de_login/. Thus the term home page appeared and then spread to its current usage.

Owing to the rise of social media sites, personal home pages are no longer as common as in the 1990s and 2000s.