Posts vs. Pages in WordPress: What’s the Difference?

If you’re starting a WordPress website, adding content to the site is one of the first things you’ll need to learn how to do. Although the WordPress interface has been refined over many years and is designed to be as easy as possible for newcomers to understand, it might not feel that way to you when you log in to your site for the first time. When you go to the “Posts” and “Pages” headings, for instance, you see screens that look almost exactly the same. What’s the difference between the two, and where are you supposed to go when you want to start creating content?

In this guide for beginners, we’re going to clear up the differences between posts and pages in WordPress. As you’re about to learn, these two types of content actually serve very different purposes. Once you understand those purposes, the fact that they’re shown under separate menus will make perfect sense to you. Let’s dive in.

What Are Posts in WordPress?

Since WordPress was first released, its capabilities have greatly expanded. In its original form, though, WordPress was designed to be an easy-to-use platform for people who wanted to start their own blogs. A post is the primary form of content in a blog.

A blog is any website with a front page that changes as new content is added. The content is displayed in reverse-chronological order, with the latest articles appearing on top. When your WordPress website uses the default blog view, the way to add content to your front page is by creating a new post.

Blogging ended up transforming the Internet to such a great extent that these days, most sites that are blogs have no need to identify themselves as such because that’s what the majority of the websites are. All news sites, for instance, are essentially blogs.

In addition to showing content on the front page, WordPress also creates archives that allow people to browse through old content or find content on specific topics. Those include the main archive – which is where old posts go after they scroll off of the front page – along with archives for authors, categories and tags. You can add categories and tags to a post when you create it.

What Are Pages in WordPress?

If your website uses the blog format – which doesn’t necessarily have to be the case, as we’ll discuss at greater length shortly – creating a new post will be your main way of adding content to the site. Posts will eventually make their way off of your site’s front page, though, and you might want a way to add content that stays where you put it permanently. That’s what pages are for. When you add a new page to your site, it may appear in your website’s header or footer menu automatically depending on your site’s configuration. If your site uses a custom menu system, you may need to add the page to your menu manually.

Another thing to consider when you add a new page to your WordPress website is that you may need to take special measures if you want Google to find the content and index it. If the page is added to your site’s menu system, it should be found without any trouble as long as Google knows about your website. If it’s not added to your menu, you’ll need to either have a sitemap or link to the page manually from another location on your site that Google knows about.

Do You Need to Use the Blog View in WordPress?

One of the great things about WordPress is that, although it’s set up to power blogs by default, you can use it for whatever type of website you like – and that can include having static content on your front page rather than a blog. You can do this by clicking the “Reading” option under the “Settings” menu. Next to “your homepage displays,” select “A static page” instead of “Your latest posts.”

If you want to run one of these types of websites, you might be best served by configuring your website to use a static front page rather than a blog view.

• An e-commerce site
• A site for a local business or professional service
• A site for an organization
• An informational site with content that rarely changes

One of the great things about WordPress is that, although you don’t have to use the default blog view, you’re free to create a site that has both a static front page and a blog. E-commerce sites like Rokin frequently do this. To set your website up this way, you simply need to add an item to your site’s menu that points to the URL of your blog’s index.

What Types of Content Should Be Posts?

When you create a new post in WordPress, it’ll typically be because you want to do one of these three things.

• You’re running a blog or magazine-style website and want to add new content. If you run one of those two types of sites, posts will represent almost all of your site’s content.
• You’re running an e-commerce or service-based business, and you want to publish informational content that might help to increase your site’s organic traffic.
• You want to publicize something like a coupon code or an upcoming event. Posts are perfect for this type of content because you’ll typically want to remove or archive the content after the promotion ends.

What Types of Content Should Be Pages?

In most cases, you want to use pages in WordPress for content that seldom or never changes. Some of the types of content that are appropriate for pages include:

• Basic information about your site such as an “About Us” page, a “Contact Us” page or a “Privacy Policy” page. Almost all websites have these three types of pages.
• Information about your company such as what services you offer and what your shipping and return policies are.
• Description pages for products that people can purchase.