PAGES V POSTS IN WORDPRESS

When you want to add content to your website, you have two options:

 Add a page, or
 Add a post.

You need to understand the differences

between them if you are going to know which
one to use in any given instance.

First, let’s just get one thing out of the way.

Most, if not all of us, call a web page a web
page. If you add content to your site as a
Wordpress post it will become a web page. If
you add a Wordpress page to your site it will
also become a web page. Therefore, during this
discussion, whenever I use the word page, I am
referring to a Wordpress page. If I want to refer
to a web page, I will call it a web page. Clear?
OK, let’s get on.

POSTS ARE CHRONOLOGICAL

Wordpress was originally designed as a blogging
platform. On a traditional blog, there are a lot
of posts which are then displayed (often on the
homepage) in chronological order with the
latest post first. Visitors can see new posts
because they are at the top of the page, with
older posts lower down. Typical blogs also have
a time stamp so you can see the date and time
each post was published.

That screenshot on the right is a blog. You can

just about make out the dates of each post.
Clicking any of those headlines will take you to a
Wordpress post displaying the full article.

The date/time stamp on these posts highlight

one of the big differences between posts and
pages. Posts are date-dependent and therefore
chronological. A page is date-independent and
not really related to any other piece of content
on the site.

Posts were originally designed to be ordered by

date, with a post you create today appearing
logically above the post you created yesterday.
Remember when we were setting up the reading settings in Wordpress?

We told Wordpress to show 10 posts per page.

Let’s assume for a moment that a site is set up as a traditional blog, with posts displayed on the
homepage.

As new posts are added to a site, older posts slide off the bottom of the homepage so that there are
always 10 posts on the homepage. As posts slide off, they are not lost or deleted. The posts will still
be on the site and accessible to visitors through the website navigation system. The navigation
system is discussed in another section of this course.

It might help to think of an example.

Suppose you were keeping a blog about your attempts to lose weight. On day 1 you weighed in at
210lb, so you write about the food you are (or didn’t) and the exercise you did that day. You’ll
probably “blog” about your emotions as you go through the stresses of dieting. Each day you write a
new entry as a kind of personal journey on your way to the new body.

When someone comes to your site, they see the daily posts in chronological order. This means
visitors to your 'blog' can follow your story logically and see how your diet is working out for you.
They immediately see how you look and feel TODAY. By scrolling down the page, they can see how
you felt yesterday and the day before.

If you want, you can also order your posts in a reverse chronological order, with the oldest post first.
This set up might be good for this type of blog as well, because people can start at the beginning of
your journey and follow your progress as the work their way down your blog homepage.

This type of chronology is not possible to do with pages (well it is, but it takes a lot of effort plus
plugins to achieve, so why bother?). Pages do not have any defined order within a site.

So chronology is one difference between posts and pages, what else?

POSTS CAN BE PUT INTO CATEGORIES, WHEREAS PAGES CANNOT

Categories help to group related content into a “silo”. If you had a website about body building, you
might write reviews of all the different types of exercise equipment. Doesn’t it make sense to put all
of the multi-gyms reviews into a single multi-gym category? This not only makes sense for a visitor,
but it also makes sense for the search engines. When someone is on a site like this reading a review
of the Bowflex PR3000 multi-gym, Wordpress makes it easy to automatically find related reviews to
show the visitor. The visitor will find themselves in a multi-gym site within the main site, or at least
that is how it will feel. When set up as I show you in this course, the multi-gyms will link between
each other, and the search engines will love this. Search engines like Google love themes on a site,
so 15 multi-gym articles each linking to related multi-gym articles offers a powerful ranking boost to
all of those articles.

POSTS CAN ALSO BE “TAGGED”, PAGES CANNOT.

Tags are another way to link different pieces of content together. We’ll discuss tags later, but for
now, just realise that they can be used to further categorise your content to help your visitors and
the search engines make sense of your project. It is possible to create tags for pages as well, but
once again, only with plugins. We try not to use plugins unless they are absolutely essential as they
do slow down the loading time of a website.

POSTS CAN HAVE EXCERPTS, PAGES CANNOT.

Another great feature of posts is that they can have Excerpts. Excerpts are short summaries of a
post that you can create as you add a post to your site. These can be used by the Wordpress theme
(and plugins) for a variety of purposes. For example, you can
set it up so your excerpt is used as the Meta Description of the
post. You can also use a plugin like YARPP (we’ll look at this
later) to display a list of related posts at the end of another
post on your site. Each related post in the list can have a
description and you’ve guessed it, that can be the excerpt.

That screenshot on the left shows a related posts section on

one of my sites. That list appears in the sidebar, but you can
also put it at the end of a post. Using the plugin, every post
will have its own unique related posts list, depending on the
topic of the post.

Excerpts are something I recommend you use, and we’ll see

how to use them later.

POSTS APPEAR IN RSS FEEDS, PAGES DO NOT

Another important feature of posts is that they appear in your
site’s RSS feed. We’ll look at RSS feeds later. New posts on
your site appear in the RSS feed and this feed is used to let
services (like search engines) know that new content is
available. Why wouldn’t you want to use posts for new
content?

Those are the main differences between posts and pages. So I

bet your next question is when to use posts and when to use pages, right? We’ll cover that in the
next lecture.