If I change my wordpress homepage..

My landing page for my WP site right now just has all of my posts and shit summarized with a "read more" button next to each one. I want to create a better looking landing page. If I move all those posts to maybe a section called "articles" or something and just link them back to my homepage, will it effect my ranking?

TLDR: As long as the content is still somewhere on my site, it counts as content to google right?

Generally, it will affect your rankings a little.
Google ranks pages, not websites. So if your homepage is ranking, say at #3, for a keyword and you change the content of the page to something completely different (even if better), it will take a little dive in rankings but will most likely come back in a few days.

That is the general process... it might not affect your rankings if you are somewhere below page 6, for example or even if it does, your site will come back up faster that it would if it were on page 1 since the competition on page 1 is certainly higher than that on page 6.

If you have traffic to those post now and you move them they will pop a 404 page not found. There is a plugin called Redirection that you can use to redirect old url to new url (301 redircect). I have not had a need to use it but worth trying out if you are getting any traffic to those post.

My site is on top of page 2 for the keyword i am ranking fyi..

Just do it, your rankings will wobble a little but as BK071 said, you'll gain if your new site will be better organized, have more pages and good internal linking. If you're on page 2, i really wouldn't hesitate, only if I was #1 or #2 would I think about it more than 5 minutes.

If I understand correctly what he wants is just something to give his site a professional look rather than some typical blog
look. You can move the recents posts down and put optin box, featured pages, or sliders above it.

Something like this:


Your content is on separate single posts, it's still the same. I believe you're ranking for
your post contents rather than what's on or your home page. So, it should be fine
to customize your home page look.