At GreenMellen, we love WordPress websites and the capabilities they provide. After we create a site, we always offer our clients the necessary training needed to understand their website, as the backend of WordPress websites can be confusing. By default, the backend will contain two types of content, which are pages and posts. To add more confusion, when you create a new page or post, they look essentially the same.
In this post, we will clear the air with any confusion you may have with WordPress pages and posts and what their purposes are.
WordPress Posts
If your site has a blog or is just a blog, posts are the published entries for your blog (you are currently reading a post of A Brighter Web’s). They will be displayed in reverse chronological order so that the newest posts are at the top of your blog feed. To avoid having visitors dig through your blog to find older posts, you will use tags and categories to organize them by topic, author, and/or content type.
The type of content that will go into posts are more conversation driven, as they have a built-in commenting feature that gives users the option to comment on your posts (you can turn this off if needed). WordPress posts will also serve as a portal where someone would visit your website. While many people think most of their visitors will enter through their homepage, that is not always the case. This is why blogs are great to optimize with keywords to enhance your website’s SEO.
WordPress Pages
WordPress pages host the static/evergreen content of a website such as your about page, privacy policy, contact page, and more. This is not to say the content on pages should not change, but they will not be suppressed by new pages the same way posts are. For example, you could have blog posts titled, “Our History: 1970-1980,” “Our History: 1980-1990,” and “Our History: 1990-Today,” but you would probably just have one page dedicated to the history.
Pages are organized hierarchically and silo your website’s content into separate sections. Take a look at our navigation on GreenMellen’s website as an example. The “What We Do” section is separated into three different categories and hosts our service pages.
Just like posts, pages can also be optimized for SEO benefits.
The Main Differences
Now that you have a brief understanding of WordPress posts and pages, let’s take a look at the fundamental differences between these pages. Keep in mind, there are exceptions to this list, as WordPress plugins or snippets can add more functionality to both types of content.
- Posts are “timely,” meaning they show a time/date stamp and the newest content will be placed at the top. Pages are not timely and should be written to be timeless.
- Pages are not meant to be social, whereas posts encourage engagement through the commenting feature.
- Posts are organized into categories and/or tags, and pages are arranged in a hierarchical fashion.
We hope you now have a better understanding of WordPress pages and posts. If you want more information about the backend of your WordPress website, contact GreenMellen today!
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