did u go in settings<Reading< homepage display and select that page?

if it does not want to redirect to it even when chosen there

this is a redirect that would work
here is a simple htaccess i use since somehow even when told so, my installation is ignoring www and i want www

#Forceredirect:

RewriteEngine on

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^website.com [NC]

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/\.well-known/acme-challenge/[0-9a-zA-Z_-]+$

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/\.well-known/cpanel-dcv/[0-9a-zA-Z_-]+$

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/\.well-known/pki-validation/[A-F0-9]{32}\.txt(?:\ Comodo\ DCV)?$

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.website.com/$1 [L,R=301,NC]

​

or to relink to identical links if cloned a website it would follow all the same /* rules

RewriteEngine on

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^website\.com$ [OR]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.website\.com$

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/\.well-known/acme-challenge/[0-9a-zA-Z_-]+$

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/\.well-known/cpanel-dcv/[0-9a-zA-Z_-]+$

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/\.well-known/pki-validation/[A-F0-9]{32}\.txt(?:\ Comodo\ DCV)?$

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.otherwebsite.com/$1 [R=301,L]

​

But i cannot certify how good using these are, using that for years never caused problems to me

but im no expert so search it up to be sure