The one way you can put information on your website and separate it is by creating posts or pages. Which one should you choose? This all depends on what information you’re putting on your website and how you want to display it.
Out of the box, WordPress provides two primary content types for you two work with: posts and pages. If you read blogs or have ever written for a blog before, the concept of a post is probably a bit familiar.
Posts
Posts often are content that appear on your blog in some kind of scheduled way. They usually are presented on your site in reverse-chronological order. Posts might be what you use to share your regular thoughts, reflections, or ideas about a topic. Posts make up a kind of “river” of content that you’re producing as part of your blogging activity.
Posts are meant for more dynamic content as they have metadata attached to them. This means that they can be categorized, tagged, and have an author and publish date. When displaying all your blog posts on a your website, they will show in order with the most recent post at the top. Because posts have a publish date, old posts become archived by the month and year of the publish date. Posts are also what show up in your RSS feed when someone subscribes to your website to get updates about your most recent content. Viewers can also interact with your posts by commenting, if you choose to enable discussion on a certain post.
Examples of posts:
- Upcoming event post
- Life update post
- Announcement post
Pages
Pages usually correspond to our more traditional concept of what makes up a Web site. Pages are presented outside of the “river” of content that are posts. They are more likely to stand alone and be organized according to a traditional hierarchy. Pages might be content that is less frequently updated or changed.
Pages are static pieces of information. They are tied to a single URL and do not contain an author and publish date. A thing that’s unique to pages is that they can be set up in a hierarchical state. This means that you can make a page a parent to another (or a page a child to another). By doing so, this can help you organize your pages. This also affects the URL of your page. Additionally, with pages, some themes have page templates that can help you with a layout of a page.
Examples of pages:
- About Me page
- Contact page
- Portfolio page
Keep in mind the examples for how to use a post or a page are just suggestions. There is no set way in how to set up your website, so have full creative reins while doing so!
If you were using WordPress to build a business Web site with a lot of information content, you would probably use Pages. If you added a feature to that site where you started to advertise special events or news, you would probably use Posts.
A few other things to know about Pages vs Posts:
- If you want your content to be accessible to your users via RSS/syndication, you’ll need to use Posts. By default, Pages do not appear in a site’s RSS feed.
- Categories and Tags (which are used in WordPress to help you organize your content) are ONLY available on Posts. Page organization is done by customizing your site’s menus.
- Okay, this get’s a little tricky: WordPress, by default, also creates “Category Pages” and “Tag Pages” that display all the Posts in a category or tag. These are NOT related to the regular Page type.
Originally written on https://blog.annickarabida.com/