The common method to display products on magento home page is to use block code and we can display mainly three types of products in any page by default
one is the newly added products
second is all the products
and third is products from a category

For first one use this code to show products labeled as “new” on your home page:
Don’t forget to set the ‘Set Product as New from Date’ and ‘Set Product as New to Date’ options in the ‘General’ product information

{{block type="catalog/product_new" name="home.catalog.product.new" alias="product_homepage" template="catalog/product/new.phtml"}}

For second one use this code to show products all products on your home page:

{{block type="catalog/product_list" name="home.catalog.product.list" alias="products_homepage" template="catalog/product/list.phtml"}}

For the third one use this code to show products from a category on your home page:

{{block type="catalog/product_list" name="home.catalog.product.list" alias="products_homepage" category_id="4" template="catalog/product/list.phtml"}}

Hope this helps you to display products on magento home page