In Seo is Dead we continue to make tutorials about WordPress for people who are starting with this tool to make websites. Let’s see the differences between posts and pages in WordPress.
What are “Posts” in WordPress?
Originally, WordPress only had posts. It had nothing else. Not even pages existed. Let’s remember that when WordPress started, it was just for blogging – obviously that’s changed a lot since then!
The first difference between Posts and pages is that post are dated. Don’t get me wrong, pages can also have a date, but it is not shown on them (although technically it is possible to do so). The important thing here is the concept. Posts are time-sensitive, as they are usually articles or news items that can become obsolete over time.
For example, if we have a corporate page of our company and we publish a news item telling that we will be present at a trade fair, it is normal to place it in a post, since this information will be interesting and valid only for a certain period of time. The same would happen with the launching of a product, or if we write about the news of the sector.
Another big difference between posts and pages is that posts can be organized by categories and tags. Categories and tags in WordPress only affect posts.
In terms of formatting and layout, posts can take advantage of the WordPress formatting system, which allows you to choose different types of layout depending on the type of content in that post.
Here you can see the difference between wordpress.org and wordpress.com. And we also tell you which one is best for your online project.
Another key difference is that posts automatically appear in the WordPress feed. That means that people who subscribe to your site will be able to see new posts as they are published, whereas that doesn’t happen with pages. This point is VERY important if you have many subscribers.
Finally, another curious detail is that a post cannot be set as the homepage. Be careful, don’t get confused… we can set the homepage to show only one post, but it will always be the last one we have written. What we can not do is that a post (article) in particular is the homepage. Obviously we could create a plugin to make it possible, but in any case it can not be done with WordPress “by default”.
How do Pages work in WordPress
Although WordPress was born in 2003, it wasn’t until February 2005 that pages were added. Until then, people had to use posts as pages.
The thing is that pages appeared, and that opened a world of new possibilities to all WordPress users, because now they could add content that did not depend on the date.
Going back to our example of the corporate website, a typical page could be the “Contact” page, where there is usually a contact form, sometimes together with other information, such as the telephone number, the physical address of the company, or even a Google map. This information is “almost” permanent. And I say “almost” because in this world there is nothing permanent. Of course, you can change your phone number or address, but this is rare. Other typical pages are “About us”, “Services”, “Products” or even “Our team”. Information that lasts over time, not tied to a date.
Another point, as we discussed earlier, is that pages cannot be organized by categories and tags. That is only for posts. But instead, they have another interesting form of organization. And that is that they are hierarchical. That means that you can create subpages, which depend on other pages.
For example, going back to our example, we could create an “Our team” page and each staff member would have their own page with their resume and job description. That would look like this at the URL level:
http://myweb.com/team
http://myweb.com/team/mike
So, we can see that even in the URL structure the hierarchy is clear.
In terms of formatting and design, the pages do not have “formats” as in the case of the posts, but have a system of “templates”, which will allow us to create and choose different types of templates to use for each particular page. Another difference, as we have already mentioned, is at the level of feeds or RSS. Unlike the posts, the pages do not appear in the feed of our website. Obviously we can modify this with plugins or code, but this is not the usual behavior.
Finally, one last detail is that any page can easily become the home page of our website, that is, the homepage. Recall that by default WordPress displays the latest posts on our homepage. But it can be easily changed, we just have to go to “Settings / Reading” and select “A static page” in the “Front page displays” option.
If we do it this way, we should also indicate which page we want to contain the posts, because if they are not on the homepage, they must appear somewhere, right? For that, the best thing to do is to create a page called “blog” and select it in the option “Page of posts”. And do not worry about filling or writing anything on that page, because it will not be displayed, as WordPress will replace it, whatever it is, to place the latest posts.
Posts are for news, articles and date-related information that we can classify with categories and tags, while pages are almost permanent information, which is organized hierarchically and can be used as a home page.
Well, I hope you find this article (not page) useful, and that it has helped you to clarify concepts or discover some new ones 🙂
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