What is the difference between a welcome page and a home page?

Question

I am working in SharePoint 2016, but I think the question would apply to 2010 or 2013 as well. Let me summarize what I do know, to make my question clear.

• The default page is what a browser loads when I type in just the name of my site, and not an specific page.
• For example, if my SharePoint site is www.awesome.com, and I type www.awesome.com in my browser, it would resolve to www.awesome.com/default.aspx by default.
• If I have Site Pages enabled, I can set any Site Page as the Home Page from the Ribbon. Thus, if I set Home.aspx as my Home Page, and I type www.awesome.com in my browser, it would now resolve to www.awesome.com/SitePages/Home.aspx.
• If I have Publishing enabled, I have a Publishing Pages library, Pages, available as well. I also have a Welcome Page setting listed in Site Settings. I can choose any page from the Pages library, for example, www.awesome.com/Pages/Home.aspx.

So my question is, what is the difference between the Welcome Page and the Home Page? They both seem to serve the same purpose, to redirect browsers to a specific page by default. But which one overrides the other? If I have Home Page already set, do I need to set a Welcome Page?

Answer 1

We could set a site homepage which is stored in the Pages (or Site Pages) library of your site.

There is only one site homepage in a site, the homepage set later overwrites the homepage set before.

You could make the site home page via Page ribbon> make home page or Welcome page settings, it's the same thing.