During a production incident on Liferay DXP 2025.Q1.15, we discovered what appears to be an inconsistency in the current page hierarchy behavior.
Current behavior
Liferay defines the first page in the page hierarchy as the effective homepage of the site. This behavior is documented and understood.
However, an administrator can also move an unpublished draft page to the first position using drag & drop. As a consequence:
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the draft immediately becomes the effective homepage,
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Guest users receive HTTP 404 because the page is unpublished,
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external monitoring (readiness/liveness probes, load balancers, Cloudflare health checks, etc.) can interpret the site as unavailable.
In our production environment, this single administrative action resulted in approximately 75 minutes of downtime until the root cause was identified.
Inconsistency
Liferay already protects the Guest Site homepage in another area of the product.
For the Guest Site, administrators cannot remove the Guest → View permission from the first page because the homepage must remain accessible to anonymous users.
However, the same homepage can still become inaccessible simply by moving an unpublished page to the first position.
These two behaviors appear inconsistent:
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Liferay prevents administrators from making the Guest Site homepage inaccessible through permissions.
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Liferay currently allows administrators to make the same homepage inaccessible through page reordering.
Suggested improvements
We believe Liferay should protect administrators from this high-impact operation.
Possible improvements include:
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Display a confirmation dialog whenever a page is moved to the first position, clearly stating that this operation changes the site’s effective homepage.
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If the page is unpublished (or otherwise unavailable to Guest users), display a stronger warning explaining that Guest users will receive HTTP 404 and external health checks may consider the site unavailable.
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Consider preventing unpublished pages from becoming the homepage of the Guest Site unless the administrator explicitly confirms the action.
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Provide the Home URL configuration at the Site level (currently it is available only at the Instance level in our environment), allowing administrators to lock the homepage for individual sites.
Why this matters
Changing the page order looks like a harmless content management operation. Most administrators do not expect that dragging a page to the first position fundamentally changes the public entry point of the website.
Because the impact is disproportionate to the simplicity of the action, additional safeguards would significantly reduce the risk of accidental production outages while remaining fully backward compatible.
We believe these improvements would make page management considerably safer, especially for production environments with multiple administrators.