Pages and Posts are the two primary ways of creating content on a WordPress site. While any content can be added both as a page or a post, choosing the more appropriate one for the content in question can make it easier for you to organize and display the information on your site in a visitor-friendly way. This would directly translate to your site’s visitors finding it easier and more intuitive in locating that piece of information on your website.
There are subtle differences between a page and a post and often beginners (and sometimes even seasoned webmasters!) get confused fighting with the ‘post vs page’ dilemma. I discuss more about “types of content” as well as “ways of organizing information” below with examples to make the concept clearer.
For the benefit of complete beginners, I first give a brief background of pages and posts and show how WordPress adopted them. If you aware of it all, feel free to skip over to the properties of pages and posts below.
A Brief Introduction To Pages And Posts
Let’s consider an imaginary furniture business’s website. It has web pages describing the products offered by the company, history of the company, the team behind the business, the shop location and contact details. There is also a small section in one corner of the home page (the main page) where small updates are posted.
Imaginary Furniture Shop’s Website
Let us look at each of these content sections in little more detail.
Home Page / Product Page(s): These describe the products and possibly their prices. The products are the central focus of this website. In most cases, it is because of our interest in the products offered that we would ever want any other information on the website, like the contact details.
Shop Location / Contact: These sections tell us about the business’ outlets and the contact details. These are what can be considered ‘complementary information’. While they aren’t the core offering of the business or the website, they are still important pieces of information and we would expect to find these details readily, without having to dig deep into the site.
Team / About Us: The Team page(s) describe the various departments in the business and their possible hierarchy. About Us could talk about the company’s values and its history. Depending upon the situation, we can consider these as important or not-so-important but if this information is present on the website, we would again expect it to be easily findable.
Updates: This is where we would expect to find information relating to new developments. New product announcements, thanksgiving offers and discounts or change in phone-support timings, all could find a place here. If we were visiting the site regularly and keeping an eye on this section, it would be more convenient to us if the latest development were added to the top rather than at the bottom so that we wouldn’t have to scroll all the way down or click through a bunch of “Newer >>” links before seeing the latest updates. Marking the updates with the corresponding date helps too, so we can know how new or old the information is and that we aren’t actually looking at an announcement of last year’s thanksgiving offer with no further updates after that.
It is easy to realize that the contents of this section change more frequently than any other part of the website. In other words, this part of the website is more dynamic. Anytime there is a new update, the site folks need to add a webpage covering the new development in detail and then add a brief explanation, date and link to the development in this section.
Adding New Updates to the Website
This can quickly become a painful task if there are many frequent announcements on the site. And if it actually involved tweaking or adding code each time, the hassle itself would have been enough to discourage new updates being added.
The Blog Steps In…
Thankfully, the blogging phenomenon, which started around the turn of the millennium and got popularized as a way for individuals to share their thoughts and experiences on a regular basis, provides an easy and robust method for publishing such updates. In their traditional avatar, blogs are like online diaries or journals but today they have become powerful platforms for ongoing publishing of a wide variety of content, not just thoughts and opinions.
The thing about blogs (or blogging software) is that they help automatically generate these dynamic sections of the website. These dynamic sections often serve as the gateway for visitors to discover and explore content on the site. This makes a site with frequently updated information more easily usable for the visitor without the blog owner needing to know any programming or engaging in gymnastics.
What’s more, the way a blog displays the information can be changed by means of settings. So, for example, we can set our updates (“posts” in blog speak) to show in the central area of a home page, or push it to a corner (like in the example furniture shop’s website above) or the sidebar or on an entirely different web page.
We can make it show just the post title (suitable on sidebars and corners), or the title with the initial few lines, or the entire post itself. We can also restrict the number of posts that show on a page or area. Where relevant, the older posts are automatically pushed to separate pages. These kind of features – and there are a lot more – make it unnecessary for us to plumb the entire site whenever we add new content to it.
All that we have to do is create a new post. The blog software automatically appends the date and time to it, and makes it appear on top of the older posts. The post is also archived by year, month and date. So clicking on an year and month in the archives would lead us to all the posts made in that month.
There are a couple more cool features integral to posts and blogs that address real needs:
Feeds
Let’s suppose you visit someone’s blog everyday to see if he has any new posts. If he isn’t someone who updates his blog regularly, this daily-checking can become a tad unrewarding at times. And it doesn’t get terribly exciting if you actually follow multiple such blogs. To provide solace, blogs generate what are known as “feeds” and automatically update them with post details every time a post is created. Software known as feed readers can be setup to “read feeds” from multiple blogs and intimate you whenever a blog you follow is updated. Google Reader was one such free software.
Classification
Let’s consider another scenario. Let’s say you have a personal blog where you write about your day’s happenings. You also happen to be a great movie buff and a fitness freak, so you routinely write reviews of the movies you watch and share fitness tips on your blog.
If someone were interested in reading only your movie reviews, he’d have no other way but to check all your posts to pick the reviews alone. If not for classification, that is.
Blogs provide different ways to classify your posts using “categories”, “subcategories” and “tags”. Categories (and subcategories) can be roughly thought of as the major types of articles or the major topics that you cover in your blog. So for example, in the above scenario that we just discussed, you could have three categories for your blog: General, Movie Reviews, Fitness Tips. Every time you write a post, you could classify it as being under any of the 3 categories. People who are interested in only your movie reviews could click on that category link on your blog and will get to see all your review posts, with the most recent ones on the top.
Sub-categories are classification within a category and tags are essentially any kind of entities that find a mention in your post. So you could ‘tag’ the review of a Brad Pitt-movie with ‘Brad Pitt’, for example. Clicking on the Brad Pitt tag would show all posts in which he was mentioned. I give more examples and explain the differences between categories, subcategories and tags in depth in a later lesson. But for now, it would suffice for you to understand that you can classify your posts under different categories.
This one feature – classification – makes blogs immensely more powerful than they were before. Without a way of classifying content like this, the utility of blogs would have been severely restricted. They would have still fared good as online diaries where you share your ramblings. Or they could have done well if they stuck with one primary topic.
But then even for a single topic like movie reviews, a blog could still become tiresome to use without having its reviews classified under action flicks, rom-coms, sci-fi and the like. Finally, they would have been great for posts which are of an “update”, “what’s new” or time-sensitive nature as the most recent updates would be the ones requiring maximum attention and very old posts would be relevant only rarely.
With classification, blogs become very versatile. You could now run a food blog where you share recipes, culinary tips, reviews of kitchen equipment and a lot more, under different categories. You are able to cover one area more holistically and people can still find what they want easily.
The posts you make need not make sense only in the context of the time of their publishing. At the same time, nothing blocks you from taking advantage of the time of publishing either. For example, you can share your granny’s Christmas cake recipes during the Christmas season. Or if you run a self-improvement blog, new year can be a good time to publish articles on how to stick to resolutions. But other times, you can just continue imparting content that is not-so-dependent on time or just simply timeless.
Pages and Posts, The Bottom Line
With all that behind us, you should now have a fair idea of where pages and posts come from and how they can be used. WordPress supports both pages and posts and the following is the summary of their features.
Posts:
- WordPress can use posts to create dynamic web pages /sections on your site
- Posts appear in a reverse-chronological order
- They appear in your website’s “feed”
- They can be classified using categories, sub-categories and tags
- WordPress automatically attaches the date of posting to them and archives them by year, month and day
Pages:
- By default, WordPress doesn’t use them much in creating dynamic web pages or content
- Pages can have child pages. Useful for sharing hierarchical information.
- They don’t appear in your site’s “feed”
- By default, can’t be classified using categories, sub-categories or tags
Now that we’ve seen the properties of posts and pages, let’s quickly review their relevance for various types of content.
When To Use What?
For standalone pieces of information, like those that are not the central focus of your website but are still important, pages do good. This would include content like About Us, Contact, Privacy Policy, Legal Disclaimer and the like. There wouldn’t be many such pieces on one website.
Content that is hierarchical in nature is usually a better-fit for pages. For example, the Departments page of a huge business. There could be Sales, Engineering and Support under the CEO. Support could have Tech and Non-Tech Support under it. It is absolutely not necessary to convey this information in multiple pages but if there is a lot to be said, then it can be modeled with CEO having three child pages (subpages). Support in turn could have 2 subpages.
Take another example of Products. Let’s say a firm manufactures Audio, Video and other electronic equipment. Each of these could be subpages of the Product page and each one could have more subpages (Audio could have CD, MP3, etc.). What about a book? A book has chapters, each chapter has multiple smaller topics and so on. If you were to put a book online on your website, pages and subpages, if used with discretion, can lend a good structure to your content.
Any information that is time-based like updates, contests, promos, especially if there is such information on a frequent basis and you have something more than a couple of lines to say about them might warrant a blog and hence posts. Consider a high-school’s football team’s website. Information about the High School, Contact, players’ Bios could all be pages. However, information about oncoming matches, match details and commentary and addition of new players to the team are all content that have a time-relevance to them and can be put up using posts on the website’s blog.
Personal diary-like websites are essentially blogs and will have their main content in posts.
Consider the content which forms a part of the central focus of a website. For example, in the above high school football team’s website, the players’ bio’s are part of the central information along with the blog. So are the product information pages on the business website. So are the recipes on the food blog. So are the tips and suggestions on a self-help site.
How do we decide which one, pages or posts, to go with for these?
This isn’t a hard rule but this is the question you need to ask yourself – this content that you want to share, does it have an open-endedness about it? Or is it a finite amount of information? For example, there can only be so many bio’s since there can be only so many players on a football team at any time (including the non-playing ones). The number of products a business has is also finite. On the other hand, the recipes are open-ended in number for there can be practically huge number of variations and dishes.
Self-improvement tips, similarly, don’t have any finiteness about them. There are so many things in self-help that you can write about. Generally, open-ended content types are better served by posts while pages go well with the finite variety.
The other way to look at it is this: if you have an ever-growing site, a blog format could help for the central content. Let’s have a little twist to the above example to see what I mean. Suppose there is a community bakery which makes about thirty different stuff and it has a website where, along with other bakery information (shop timings etc), it gives out the recipes of the items it sells. Since these recipes are now discrete in number, pages wouldn’t really be out-of-place for the recipes on it’s website.
Sometimes asking yourself whether the content you have in mind can be better organized by multiple categories and sub-categories can help. If the classification doesn’t sound forced or unnatural, then posts may be more desirable. But you should ask this question only after the finite-or-open-ended question. The players’ bio’s and the products can be, after all, classified as Bios or Products. They are not standalone information either but its because of their finiteness that they are better served by pages.
It is also good to remember that if you decide to have lots and lots of pages, it could become difficult to organize them, so planning and proper use of child pages and plain old links will make sure that your readers can still navigate your site easily and find the information they want.
These strategies will help you to decide on which to use when.
Finally, before I wrap up this lesson, if you wonder what if you want to have pages but also want to categorize them or want them to show up in your site’s feed, there’s news for you. You can indeed do both of these with the help of plugins. You will have to install them specially on your WordPress site. That doesn’t mean that you can use pages with abandon. My opinion is these plugins mainly serve those people who probably didn’t spend time deciding whether to use posts or pages for their content and ended up choosing the wrong one. These plugins are then more like band-aids and seldom serve a legitimate usage.
It might sound a little confusing in the beginning, but once you ponder just a bit, things should become very clear to you. In the next lesson, we will create our very first post.
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