In regard to step 4 of your solution: What is your advised course of action, if the built-in settings to designate homepage is not present?
I tried on a couple different themes and the option you describe is not available.
Oddly the homepage does show correctly in the built-in-preview when you customize, but not when you launch the preview function(with the eye-icon) or access the site.
Thank you for any additional assistance you can provide
Hey, @Fresom ! That does look strange. It looks like we’ll need to access your account in order to resolve this issue.
While we’re not able to provide account-specific support via Community at this time, we’d be happy to continue assisting you through our available support channels. Please visit our help center (https://bit.ly/3cJkx8V) and login for assistance.
The issue is sovled. I suspect the error was caused either by browser cache or serverside cache, or a combination of these.
But overall a very strange behavior.
After moving the domain from another shop system to Shopify, the browser kept creating abominations of URL adresses. A mix of Shopify URLs and the old shops URLs.
This URL occured when clicking the logo and/or using the navigation. Rest of the site worked as intended. This behavior persisted for a long time (weeks).
To the best of my knowledge, there isnt a Shopify function to force a certain page to be the frontpage - so when Shopify thinks the above example is the correct URL - you are out of luck! (Some themes may have a function to enforce a starting page, but that is far from all themes, as i tested quite a few of them.)
I had a Shopify partner look it over and realised he wasnt seeing the same error. He made a redirect from the faulty URL to the correct URL and apparantly that was enough to reset the cache and the issue resolved.
Again, i thank you all for your interest and assistance.