Basic WordPress training: The difference between posts and pages
One of the challenges faced by new WordPress users is understanding the difference between posts and pages. Here, we’ll look at the differences, and identify when you would use one or the other.
What make posts different from pages?
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Posts are:
- Usually ordered by date: Posts appear with the most recent at the top of the first page.
- Organised with categories and tags: You can choose to put your posts into one or more categories or give them one or more tags.
- Collected on archive pages (pages organised by date, category or tag): Archive pages show all posts in date order, or all posts in a specific category for example.
- Available via an RSS feed: Visitors can choose to subscribe to your posts via RSS.
Pages are:
- Not included in a date-ordered stream of posts: It doesn’t matter when pages are created, they are usually navigated to via a main menu.
- Pages don’t have categories or tags: They are stand-alone pieces of content and won’t appear on an archive page.
- Pages can have a hierarchy: You might have a page that is the head of a section (A parent page) and several sub-pages that belong to that page (Child pages).
- Pages do not appear in an RSS feed.
When would you use Posts?
Posts are used whenever you want to add information to the blog portion of your site. This might include news, articles and updates. Basically anything that is time and date sensitive or specific to a particular area of your work would be best served in a post.
When would you use Pages?
Pages are used for more traditional web content. They are static and should cover more general information like an ‘About’ page or a ‘Contact’ page.
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Post and pages in action
On TextileArtist.org the blog stream looks like this. This is a list of blog posts organised by date. Pages would never appear in this stream.
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[ezcol_1quarter]Click on any of the blog post titles to be taken to the full post, which looks like this. It is organised with specific information like date, author, and the categories it belongs to.
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[ezcol_1quarter]Here is our About page. This is a page and isn’t organised by the same criteria as posts.
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