Don’t Get Confused With Posts And Pages In WordPress - Post VS Pages In WordPress

I think whatever we share with our readers or followers, we always should implement that technique first for ourselves and if that is useful then you can share your experience with your readers.

When I was start learning WordPress for myself, at that time I face too many problems in some basic aspects of WordPress, which is quite similar for all beginners and the questions are like (How to add MENU, what is the difference between Posts and Pages, How to Add Images in content etc.). I think I should discuss each and every basic concept of WordPress for beginners.

What Are Post?

If you are using WordPress as a blog, then you will end up using posts for majority of your site’s content. Posts are content entries listed in reverse chronological order on your blog’s home page. Due to their reverse chronological order, your posts are meant to be timely. Older posts are archived based on month and year. As the post gets older, the deeper the user has to dig to find it. You have the option to organize your posts based on categories and tags.

Because WordPress posts are published with time and date in mind, they are syndicated through the RSS feeds. This allows your readers to be notified of the most recent post update via RSS feeds. Bloggers can use the RSS feeds to deliver email broadcasts through services like Aweber or MailChimp. You can create a daily and weekly newsletter for your audience to subscribe to. The very timely nature of posts make it extremely social. You can use one of the many social sharing plugins to allow your users to share your posts in social media networks like Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn etc.

Posts encourage conversation. They have a built-in commenting feature that allows users to comment on a particular topic. You can go to your Settings » Discussion to turn off comments on older posts if you like.

What Are Pages?

Pages are meant to be static “one-off” type content such as your about page, privacy policy, legal disclaimers, etc. While the WordPress database stores the published date of the page, pages are timeless entities. For example, your about page is not suppose to expire. Sure you can go back and make updates to it, but chances are you will not have about page 2012, about page 2013 etc. Because there is no time and date tied to pages, they are not included in your RSS feeds by default. Pages are not meant to be social in most cases thus does not include social sharing buttons, or comments.

You don’t want users to comment on your contact page, or your legal disclaimers page. Just like you probably don’t want others to tweet your privacy policy page in most cases.

Unlike posts, pages are hierarchical by nature. For example, you can have a sub pages within a page. A key example of this in action would be our Blueprint page. This feature allows you to organize your pages together, and even assign a custom template to them.

WordPress by default comes with a feature that allows you create custom page templates using your theme. This allows developers to customize the look of each page when necessary. In most themes, post and pages look the same. But when you are using your page to create a landing page, or a gallery page, then this custom page templates feature comes in very handy.

Pages also have this archaic feature called Order which lets you customize the order of pages by assigning a number value to it. However this feature is extended by plugins like Simple Page Ordering that allows you to drag & drop the order of pages.

Posts Options

There are a few options that are specifically for posts only.

Categories And Tags

Posts will use categories and tags, but pages don’t. There are plugins that do allow you to use categories with pages, but likely you will just need them for your posts.

Excerpt

The excerpt option lets you create a brief description of your post. It can be very useful. How it displays will depend on your theme.

Here is an example would. Often you will find on your blog archive page that the full post isn’t listed. It might instead be a photo, the title and a short blurb that encourages people to click through to read the rest of the post. This is much better for your readers because they scan blog posts on your archive page without scrolling. By default, most themes will pull in the first few lines of the post. But if you add an excerpt, it often replaces those first few lines. Readers like it because it gives them a short synopsis of your post’s topic.

Send Trackbacks

Trackbacks are a way to let someone on another WordPress site know you are talking about them. Let’s say that I am referring to another blogger’s post in my post.I would put in the URL of that specific post, and they would then be notified that I was talking about them. Cool, huh? But unfortunately trackbacks have become a source for spammers. So read up on the pros and cons a bit more to get a better idea of whether you should use them.

Pages Options

The only technical difference between pages and posts is found in thing Page Attributes.

Parent

This is where you can set pages as a child page of another page, which basically means a sub-page. You will only see the effect of this option when viewing all pages in your dashboard. It will not affect the navigation as you need to set that up in your Appearance > Menus.

Template

Every theme has a set of templates. Here you see two of the basic templates: Archive and Blog. You might choose the blog template if you want an inside page to be your blog posts, rather than your homepage. You can learn more about that in this post or this podcast.

You may see more templates than this screenshot shows you. Often themes have other templates, such as portfolio or landing page. A landing page template would likely remove the header and the navigation to create a simple landing page. I would recommend testing and viewing the templates available with your theme. Of course, the default template is what you will be using most.

Order

This is how you can order your pages. Again, this has no effect on your navigation menus. Like the Parent option, you will only see this on your All Pages dashboard view. By default, on that page they are listed in alphabetical order. You can, of course, list them in any order you would like.

Posts vs. Pages (Key Differences)

The differences we list below definitely have exceptions. You can use plugins or code snippets to extend the functionality of both content types. Below is the list of key differences by default.

1. Posts are timely vs. Pages are timeless.

2. Posts are social vs. Pages are NOT.

3. Posts can be categorized vs. Pages are hierarchical.

4. Posts are included in RSS feed vs. Pages are not.

5. Pages have custom template feature vs. Posts do not.

Frequently Asked Questions

How Many Posts and/or Pages can I have?

You can have as many posts and/or pages that you want. There is no limit on the number of posts or pages that can be created.

Are there any SEO advantages to one or the other?

Search engines like content to be organized. Timeless content is considered to be more important however there is a lot of priority given to latest timely content. In short, there may be a difference, but as a beginner you do not need to worry about it. Focus on making your site organized for the user.

Final Words

I have tried my best to let you understand the clear and basic difference between Posts & Pages in WordPress. Hope this article fulfilled all the basic knowledge and if you still have any confusion please comment below.