In a few Web sites, if we type the Web site name, (like www.someurl.com) it will automatically load the page www.someurl.com/index.aspx. This is because of the setting of the “Default Document” feature of IIS. In this post we are going to discuss this feature of IIS.
- Open IIS, type the command “inetmgr” in Run window.
- Select “Default Document” and click.
- In the feature view, we can see some type of Document orderly kept.
![Default-Document_IIS]()
- The top most had the highest priority and the last one had the least priority.
As per the above figure, the document “Default.htm” had the highest priority and the file “Default.aspx” had the lowest priority. This means whenever the user types a url (like www.someurl.com), then IIS looks for any one of the files that exist in the above order on that Virtual Directory. If it finds any one of the files, it will load that page.
IIS also allows, adds/removes the custom default document per Web site. For example, if we specify a page (say home.htm) as the default document which does not exist in the website, then IIS will look into that website and alert the user as shown below, which explicitly states that each time we type the url, IIS will look in that order.
![Default-Document_IIS-Aler]()
As per the alert, it is advisable to move the default document at the top level, which will increase the performance in the sense IIS can avoid going further down in the list.
I hope this helps beginners.