Discover the difference between WordPress posts and pages

There two types of content on a WordPress website and when creating articles you have a choice and it can be either a post or a page. What is the difference? Does it matter which you use? Let’s take a look at the differences and then create a new post.

A website can be made up entirely of posts or entirely of pages, but the content you add will usually suit one better than the other.

Most websites use a mixture of both posts and pages, but usually posts outnumber pages by a wide margin. Nearly all the articles you see on a website are posts.

Posts: A stream of new articles and features organised by date. They do not appear on menus
Pages: Used for the About page, Contact page, Terms and Conditions, Privacy Statement. Pages appear on menus

These are not strict rules and you can put a post on a menu or take a page off a menu, use a page for your latest blog post or put an About page or Privacy statement on a blog post. You can use them however you want, but it is best to use them as intended.

WordPress posts

Posts have a date and are displayed in chronological order with the the newest first and oldest last. Imagine a news site where the latest news stories appear first and they get progressively older as you read down the list of headlines.

Posts allow people to write comments at the bottom and you and visitors can engage in discussions.

Posts can be assigned to categories and have tags (keywords). There are ways to display all posts of a particular category or those that have a particular tag.

Imagine a food website with recipes. There could be two categories, one for Meat and the other for Vegetarian. It would be possible to list all vegetarian recipes for instance.

Posts automatically appear in a feed with the newest first and oldest last.

WordPress pages

Pages have a date, but it is unimportant and they are not presented in any particular order. The About page of a website simply tells people who created the site and what it is about. A Contact page contains contact information and perhaps a form to enable people to contact you. It wouldn’t make sense to sort these pages by date.

Pages do not have comments. You don’t want people commenting on your About page, Privacy Statement or Terms and Conditions.

Pages do not have categories or tags. They are not usually needed.

Posts and pages can have different templates, so they can be designed to look different. The About page for example, can look very different to a regular post.

Pages do not appear anywhere on the website unless you put them on a menu. For this reason, you wouldn’t want to create website with 100 pages – just think of all the menus you would need!

However, you could easily have 100 posts or even 1,000. Posts titles can be displayed as a list with 10 or 20 to a page and visitors can click a button to see the next 10 or 20, and so on.

Pages vs posts

If your website will only ever be 10 to 20 pages, you could create it entirely from pages.

Example 1. Suppose you are a plumber and offer plumbing services from your website. It is a business site on which you have a home page, contact page, a page where you list your services, and perhaps a couple of others. All these items are fixed and timeless. They are best as pages and not posts.

Example 2. Suppose you have a food website. Your latest news story, meal recipe, review, or comments should be a post. Fresh content is added weekly and there is a never-ending stream of new articles. These should be posts.

You might publish a new post every week or even every day. Some popular websites create posts every hour. The About page might not change for a year or more.