Often WordPress beginners get confused between posts and pages. By default, WordPress comes with two content types, posts and pages. As a beginner, you are probably wondering what is the difference between them? It seems to have similar fields in the dashboard. It seems to look the same on the website. Why do I need both? When should I use posts? When should I use pages? In this article, we will explain the difference between posts vs. pages in WordPress.
Video Tutorial
If you don’t like the video or need more instructions, then continue reading.
Posts
If you are using WordPress as a blog, then you will end up using posts for majority of your site’s content. Posts are content entries listed in reverse chronological order on your blog’s home page. Due to their reverse chronological order, your posts are meant to be timely. Older posts are archived based on month and year. As the post gets older, the deeper the user has to dig to find it. You have the option to organize your posts based on categories and tags.
Because WordPress posts are published with time and date in mind, they are syndicated through the RSS feeds. This allows your readers to be notified of the most recent post update via RSS feeds. Bloggers can use the RSS feeds to deliver email broadcasts through services like Aweber or MailChimp. You can create a daily and weekly newsletter for your audience to subscribe to. The very timely nature of posts make it extremely social. You can use one of the many social sharing plugins to allow your users to share your posts in social media networks like Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn etc.
Posts encourage conversation. They have a built-in commenting feature that allows users to comment on a particular topic. You can go to your Settings » Discussion to turn off comments on older posts if you like.
Pages
Pages are meant to be static “one-off” type content such as your about page, privacy policy, legal disclaimers, etc. While the WordPress database stores the published date of the page, pages are timeless entities. For example, your about page is not suppose to expire. Sure you can go back and make updates to it, but chances are you will not have about page 2012, about page 2013 etc. Because there is no time and date tied to pages, they are not included in your RSS feeds by default. Pages are not meant to be social in most cases thus does not include social sharing buttons, or comments.
You don’t want users to comment on your contact page, or your legal disclaimers page. Just like you probably don’t want others to tweet your privacy policy page in most cases.
Unlike posts, pages are hierarchical by nature. For example, you can have a sub pages within a page. A key example of this in action would be our Blueprint page. This feature allows you to organize your pages together, and even assign a custom template to them.
WordPress by default comes with a feature that allows you create custom page templates using your theme. This allows developers to customize the look of each page when necessary. In most themes, post and pages look the same. But when you are using your page to create a landing page, or a gallery page, then this custom page templates feature comes in very handy.
Pages also have this archaic feature called Order which lets you customize the order of pages by assigning a number value to it. However this feature is extended by plugins like Simple Page Ordering that allows you to drag & drop the order of pages.
Posts vs. Pages (Key Differences)
The differences we list below definitely have exceptions. You can use plugins or code snippets to extend the functionality of both content types. Below is the list of key differences by default.
- Posts are timely vs. Pages are timeless.
- Posts are social vs. Pages are NOT.
- Posts can be categorized vs. Pages are hierarchical.
- Posts are included in RSS feed vs. Pages are not.
- Pages have custom template feature vs. Posts do not.
Frequently Asked Questions
How Many Posts and/or Pages can I have?
You can have as many posts and/or pages that you want. There is no limit on the number of posts or pages that can be created.
Are there any SEO advantages to one or the other?
Search engines like content to be organized. Timeless content is considered to be more important however there is a lot of priority given to latest timely content. In short, there may be a difference, but as a beginner you do not need to worry about it. Focus on making your site organized for the user.
Doesn’t that mean, we should always use Pages if we want a unique design for the mega content we are going to create?
Otherwise, post seems to have a lot of limitation of how the overall content visual to be structured.
I have to translate my content across multiple languages – so my current blog is being housed in pages vs posts. If I move my blog over to posts – can i translate that out?
Hi Stephanie,
You can translate your WordPress content by using a WordPress multilingual plugin.
Hello and thanks for the great site. I’ve been running some WP sites for a few years and I always come to WPBeginner for quality and concise information.
The sites I’ve built have been fine with static pages but one client (my wife) wants to add a blog to her martial arts site.
How do we make something that looks like the blog page on this site?
I understand how to create the post, and can add it to a menu, but do not know how to make a page with the chronological list of posts.
Is this a feature of the specific theme? I am using Genesis and Responsive.
Thanks again, I’m sure there’s an obvious solution that I’m overlooking.
Hi Bruce,
Please see our guide on how to create a separate page for blog posts in WordPress.
I’m not sure i was doing wrong. Please help.
On my website, im publishing the same topic as Post and page (So two URLs has same topic, 1 page and 1 posts).
Any issues on that? or do i need to remove one of them? Thanks.
Hi,
I have been using wordpress for web development for a while now. I am starting a new tutorial site in wordpress. I am confused in writing tutorials as pages or posts. Number of tutorials wil be huge. So should i publish tutorials as posts or pages.(please suggest me on this). And how do i include category name in permalink of pages
Suggestions will be highly appreciated.
Many Thanks
I have a smiliar question. Waiting for this to be answered.
Seems like no one has answered you yet so I’ll make my own decision based on the article.
I would like each of my tutorials to be shared on social media and accept comments which would lead me to posts instead of pages.
However, my tutorials cover many different themes and I feel like having a category list to the side with 5 billion different links will be a bit much. I also don’t like that they will be time and date stamped because they really aren’t blog posts but permanent pages on my site that most likely will never be changed or replicated.
I guess I’ll just suck it up and go with posts.
I say definitely use posts, and I’m almost certain that you can fill pages with certain types of posts to categorize them using the hierarchy of pages.
Use a custom post type. Setup a custom post type for your Tutorials, specifically. That is the best setup, as it is clean and keeps your blog posts sepearate. Pages are absolutely inferior in this use case, and most use cases. A good plugin for this is CPT UI (free). That mixed with Advanced Custom Fields offers an incredible amount of customization and efficiency if used correctly.
As for the many category issue. I recommend reading some guides on categories/tags. Ideally, your categories should be few and broad, while your tags are many. With ACF you can create new “category” type lists if needed, often not needed though.
You can also depend on sub-categories a lot. Having very broad parent categories, with their many child categories beneath. Show the user only the child categories for their selected main category and they won’t have a large list to deal with. When they see the initial tutorial page you show them the parent categories only. There are many ways of achieving a user-friendly design through this.
I’m building a website with more or less timeless content. Definitely not a blog with dates, etc.. So I could dispense with Posts altogether? I have put Pages on the top running menu bar. Each Page will have a bunch of sub-pages and those can have sub-pages (grandchild pages?). Which will also dictate the URLs, right? From the reply to the previous question, I gather the downside to that is that Pages can’t be labeled with categories? Downside of using Posts,however, is that they can’t be grouped and sub-grouped under a Page?
In the past few days I’ve been wondering if those general content descriptors on the menu bar should be categories instead of Pages. This reply to the previous question seems to point in that direction: “Another way to do that is by creating templates for your categories.” But no … I’m going to have a mammoth informational/magazine type site and that would extremely limit the number of categories, seems to me. Maybe that wouldn’t matter if the number of tags was kept limited, however.
I’m not totally new to WordPress, since I use Wordpess.com for a simple personal portfolio type site. So category name(s) will appear–usually on the top left corner–of a post. But they won’t appear at all on a Page?
Whew! Sorry to sound so confusing. (Well, obviously, I’m confused!). Can you just answer the first question: Can I dispense with Posts altogether? What are the disadvantages and advantages of that?
I can’t be the first person with this question in mind. Thanks!
Hi Susan,
You can dispense posts altogether and use pages with child pages to organize your site’s structure. You can add categories and tags to pages, if you want.
From my static home page, there are blog post categories in the menu across the top. Can I pin content to the top of the category archive page? Regular pinning isn’t working for that.
I have a lifestyle blog for my city. When someone goes to a category from the top menu (food, drink, shopping, etc.) I want them to see a short description (that will always be at the top), then see the blog posts that fall into that category as they scroll down.
Is there a way to do that? I’m using the Bento theme.
I’m game to change the categories across the top to pages so the content I want to always be seen would be there, but would I be able to get the posts to show up underneath?
Thanks for any help I can get.
Hey Terry,
There are multiple ways to do that. For example, you can add the content you want to be displayed as category descriptions. Another way to do that is by creating templates for your categories. You can add them by simply naming the file category-{category-slug}.php like category-news.php.
I’m trying to organize a blog of my trips with pages for each day and pictures associated with those pages. Is this possible in WordPress?
Hey Julie,
Yes. In fact many travel writers use WordPress to share their journeys with photos, galleries, videos, text, and more. Check out our guide on how to start a WordPress blog for step by step instructions on how to get started.
Thanks I have just been cleared!
I confess I´m pretty confused about it. I actually don´t know deal with categories in a post.
Hi Civali,
Please take a look at our guide on the difference between categories and tags. It will help you understand how to use categories for your posts.
I wonder how to organize content like episode guides for a TV show (that has been broadcasted years ago) with a kind of scientific interpretation of it. I think it’s very much timeless content, since it’s no actual show anymore and I don’t want to have comments on it. It should be the definitive article on the net to the subject.
So, should I write my big episode guide with plot and interpretation as a page and just put a post on my blog like “new episode guide for show – episode x season y” with a link to the page?
I have to admit it was hard to decide against a wiki because I don’t think I have timely content. But a blog seems to be more like a reflection of my personal opinion and more conversational and entertaining than a “dry” wiki text.
Hi Bastian,
There are plenty of ways to organize this in WordPress. For example, you can Use categories for each season, and create a new post for each episode in that season.
You can use tags to assign different characters, topics, and themes that came up during that particular episode.
You can also create a custom post type.
Thank you very much. Sounds interesting.
Somehow I think it just doesn’t feel right to use pages for articles. All the fine features like widgets, sharing etc. have to be added through plugins while posts have it all embedded. ATM I tend to use posts, because it just feels right. It feels like the way, WordPress should be used.
What I like on Pages in a strange way is, that all these distractions like widgets, sharing etc. are missing. The content area is wider (in my current theme), so for now: I start using posts but not sure if it will always stay this way. I will just have an open mind and keep experimenting. Time will tell.
Hi all,
I just understand the difference between the page and posts.
Thanks buddy.
As a beginner this little tutorial was helpful. I was getting into a default blog when trying to create a website. I hope to get to the point of moving in-between the website, dashboard, preview, publish and other tools that word press offers. So time to start learning.
Every post must be in a page but a page contain many article.
Please how did you enter meta keywords in a site used in wordpress
Can I have pages that display different posts on one blog?
I mean to have one page with News (updated daily) and one page Articles (updated weekly). Is it possible to do it on WordPress.
Should I create a custom post type?
Thanks for an awesome article … all of my confusion about post Vs page has been removed by this one article.
Please I want to inquire on how to make different Blog pages for different posts
hello !
I am new to wordpress and recently I have started ablog for celebrity gossips. I have written all the contents in pages and then linked it with the post in homepage.I dont want post to be shown in homepage .So I posted a post and then linked them with pages .But the problem is my pages arenot showing up in google.Only posts are shown .
So , is it that pages arenot shown in google??
My page is half a month old , so that maybe a reason for google to not show up but then a post which was just 1 day old showed up .So it worried me .
So inorder to show up in google , which one is better , pages or post ?
please check your front page code and wp reading setting choice a static page in reading setting of wordpress.
What is the difference between COMMENT AND POST in WordPress?Please help.
A Comment is the discussion thread that you can (if you wish) have for a page or a post. In other words you are commenting on a Blog “Post” for an example. Basically the same thing you are doing now, you are commenting by asking a question. Hope that helps.
I’m new to WP, have just started a WP site and have a top menu link “Articles” which will link to a page listing all my articles (static content) with short descriptions of each and links to an individual page for each article.
The person hosting my site insists posts are the way to go rather than pages. I am used to using HTML for other sites and have no problem with building the links. I like the idea of being able to have my own descriptions and order for the articles list and fail to see the advantages of posts for this. Any insights?
If I used posts I belief I could assign them to an articles category to keep them together but could I then arrange them in my preferred order and write or change my own descriptions?
I have started to write on Pages. How do I link one page to the next in chronological order on each Page published? For example, in posts, there is a link to the previous and the next post. I cannot find this in Pages. Can you help please?
Please take a look at our guide on the difference between posts vs pages in WordPress.
You may also want to check out our guide on the difference between self hosted WordPress.org vs free WordPress.com blog.
hi, i am developing a holiday site and using wordpress. i am having property style pages and then also looking at having category pages (hotels, cottages, campsites). i have been considering the following format:
property pages as custom post types
category pages with ability to insert category lists (so can format a little more)
i was just wondering as seo is absolutely critical for this project to work would i be better to do the property pages as “pages” and if so is it possible to add any kind of taxonomy to a page so that i can pull them through to a category page?
thanks
neil
hi all
Any one please attention in my index,php i have a menu, a banner , after that slogan , slogan some content regarding site and three content regarding read more, and a footer option , problem is this . any how read content is not published, or not shown in index.php my i created read more in post option.
any one understand this
where i m wrong,
Please be so kind to help me invert the order of appearance of new sections in a page – I want new sections to appear on top, not on the bottom of the page. Many thanks in advance!
Thanks for a very interesting article. It would be *really* helpful too to hear the reasons as to why you chose to write this article as a Post rather than a Page. Thanks!
What a great point! This is very much timeless or “evergreen” content.
I suppose the main reason for publishing it as a Post is that the author wants us to share it! As I have just done on Twitter.
If I read the article correctly you wanted to receive comments and posts enable that more easily than pages. Also this content may change as new releases alter functionality. Just a thought
This is a useful and very clear post. But it doesn’t address the one issue about posts and pages that is really confusing me, as a WP newbie. If I wish to add products to a WP site, should they be added as Pages or Posts? In my case, the Products in question are books by various authors. If I list them as Posts then website visitors can use Categories to filter them by Author. However I cannot see how to add Author photo and biographical info to the same result page. And if I list then as Pages (so that I can have a section with Author photo and biographical note, etc, I cannot see how to generate and filter (through Categories) the results so that X Author’s page will show only X author’s books. I have even tried a number of dedicated book and ecommerce themes, but none of them seems to provide for what I thought would be a basic ingredient. Am I missing something? Thanks in any case for the good work!
You may want to check our guide on Why do you need a custom post type or taxonomy in WordPress.
how to apper recent posts on top ???
Write a post> see SETTING in bottom, press IMMEDIATELY and decide on which date & time you want to show your post is published. then publish. latest post is shown on top.
now I guess that I’m commenting now on a post not a page !!!
Yes.
Awesome! Short and to the point. I spent all night going through the blog support site with no answers… only to have this clearly explained in a less than 2 minute video!
Glad to help. Thanks for the feedback.
This article is very useful. I have a question though. I have been experimenting with putting Categories in the Menu as described, in order to have certain posts appear on a single display if you click on a certain menu item. This seems to work EXCEPT that the posts then appear without titles, dates or anywhere for a reader to leave a comment. Is there a way to get these details to display please?
Hey its a great article . I just wanted to know one thing that if the sites like, use a page or post to give in contents i am really confused because there are separate plugins that allow a user to post like feature on a page.
Im a total noob at WP.. Can i ask how do I add categories in the posts? For eg. Baking and Homestuffswedo
I understand that posts are categorize in different timings so I hope I am able to categorize them in different themes.
Please see our guide on Categories and Tags in WordPress.
I don’t understand why on earth you would not want to have a template for a post, just as you would for a page. I have a website built mostly from pages, and we are now trying to enable blogging, and it refuses to play nicely because of there being no way to specify template for posts. The site is based on Twenty Eleven. Some pages (using “default template”) are full-width, some (using “sidebar template”) are three-column. In the three column mode, there’s a “Main Sidebar” on the left and “Extra Sidebar” on the right.
I’ve created a “posts page” for my blog, and this too looks fine. But when I click to view one of the posts, I go to a full-width format, and the content from the Main Sidebar is laid directly on top of the content from the post. It’s not in a column to the left of the blog content, it’s sitting right on top of it. At the end of the post, there’s the Extra Sidebar content shoved way down to the bottom.
I have pulled what little hair I have left out over this, and I am no further along than I was days ago. Anyone able to provide me with links to ideas, solutions, workarounds, similar situations? Anything?
And also, back to my original question, if this is a “feature” rather than an “oversight,” why on earth would people want it this way? I’m missing something on this.
Thanks.
Hi,
Thanks for the explanation.
May I know if this article is a post or a page?
Thanks
W
It’s a post.
Perhaps what you need is categories not pages.
Lets say you have a news site and you want posts to appear on Local News, Sports, Opinion pages. You can do that by creating categories local news, sports, opinion. When writing a post simply select the category you want to file that post into.
You can also add categories to appear in your site’s navigation menu. Simply go to Appearance > Menus and add categories to your navigation menu. Now if someone clicks on Sports they will go to the page where all your sports related posts will appear.
This is on track with my question. I have it so my posts go in the correct category pages, but once in there the entire post shows up. Is there a way to display only a preview or grid after selecting a category page? For news articles I see how this layout makes sense. I am posting recipes and would like my readers to be able to view a grid of all my posts and then selecting individually. When I tried using the Post Grid plug-in, it made all of my posts, regardless of category, show up.
How on earth does one “post” on a PARTICULAR PAGE? Add new post makes it go to your website’s lala land. There must be a way to add a post to only the page you want it visible on. What am I missing? I’m getting really frustrated with WordPress. It seems not at all intuitive or user friendly.
Add post category to menu. Add the posts you want displayed to that page.
You should use Categories for sorting your posts.
thanks the explanation is clear. however i believe wordpress is complicated and not logical. i would like to use it as a travel blog, so i would have a page for each country and of course i would like to be able to see my post under the country however the post does not show under the given country page??? can you explain?
Erica,I have the same doubt while Iam building a travel website,can you please email me with details how many pages and posts you added in your site which one is more seo friendly.
Please share the hierarchy on pages > posts
You can try to hide posts from your template and remove it from the SEO plugin.
Dear Syed you have totally lost me. As per my post above I have created a whole site with “posts” instead of “pages”. Your reply is not clear.
Thanks for this article. I have built a few word press web sites but am a tad confused. I chose “posts” way back over “pages”. Not sure why. But I notice that Google shows the date of the post in snippet preview. This worries me as my posts are timeless and not specific to any particular time. I would prefer not to see the date of the article – I am concerned that in five years time people may not read my article in preference to a “page” that shows no date. I’d appreciate any suggestions on changing this and the benefits or dangers in doing so. Thanks. Pat
A very clear explanation of the difference between posts and page
I’m new to WP and to your site; great info. I now have a much greater understanding about the difference between the two subject elements (i.e. Posts, Pages). Still, though, my issue seems to fall in between all the great information I have read here (and a couple other sites), that being, what’s best way to handle my old articles (real, full-length articles) from my Microsoft FrontPage site. There is not that many, so manual work doesn’t bother me. I want them to remain readily available for readers. It seems that creating a new “Post” for each article wasn’t correct, as, seemingly, that would be presenting them as “fresh or new” and even giving them some new date. I stopped what I began, due to uncertainty. – I set my Genesis Lifestyle Pro Theme to have a STATIC Page and “Posts” goes to a BLOG. I created a NEW PAGE – not post – (e.g. “12 Old Articles Bucket”) to hold the 12 links for the individual articles. As for the 12 ARTICLES, I CREATED a NEW PAGE (not a post) for each, and then, copied/pasted plain text to each. I opened “12 Old Articles Bucket” and linked to each article. I added “12 Old Articles Bucket” to the PRIMARY NAVIGATION menu.
Technically, is it wrong to place the text directly onto the PAGES (12) as I’ve done? For one thing, there seemed to be no way of adding categories or tags by doing it this way. I’ve read about articles vs. posts, migrating from one system to another, etc., but this issue seems to fall through the cracks. I’m hoping to “POST” all “new” articles of this category as a Blog. Sorry about the length. Thanks.
thanks for the article. I’m still not clear on this: When you create a new Page you get a new menu that opens that page. Is it the same with Posts? When you create a new Post do you get a new menu that opens that Post?
Or are Posts on Pages?
When you want a Blog “page” you want a Post, not a page, right? Is every new Blog entry a new Post or are they all contained within one Post?
Thanks
I agree with Stacy, this was an excellent and very clear post on the subject. Given the search phrase I used, this article turned up as result #2, but it was far superior to WordPress’ own official response that happened to be the #1 result.
Thank you, now I understand!
Fantastic post! I am directing my blogging students here to settle the debate about what exactly IS the difference between a post and a page.
Thank you for such super clear information! I’ve been working online for 4 years, been on dozens of lists for ‘beginners’ and still never had posts vs. pages explained so clearly as you’ve done here. I wish I had known that at the beginning, I would have saved days worth of time! Thanks again.
Thanks,
Well I assume that if you have just 20 posts in a category they will never go away unless you write new posts that push them further down in the category. i was just wondering what happen when people write too many posts in a single category? Will WP automatically file them somewhere or just leave them there indefinetely?.
I don´t know what happens to older posts as times goes by and new entries start displacing the old ones…
your posts will remain filed under that category. Depending on your theme and wordpress settings your category page will show a limited number of posts on the category page with a link to older posts at the bottom of the page.
Hi,
I have a question: Does wordpress automatically archive posts after a certain period of time?.
I want to create a gallery of images and I want to write about every single image. I don´t know if I should use pages or posts. I would like to use posts because people can give their opinion and because I can place them in different categories, but i´m afraid that if I use posts they will dissapear eventually.
I want to create a category, add a post with the main gallery of images and then write individual posts explaining every image of the gallery. I will do like this for every image gallery. At the end, every category should not have more than 20 posts or so.
Would it be a mistake if I create this whole layout using posts instead of pages?. I want to use posts but as I´ve said, i´m afraid that after a while wordpress removed (or achived) them automatically. In which case I will lose all of my work :(.
What do you recommend?. Should I use posts or pages?. Can you explain if wordpress automatically removes posts after a certain period of time?.
Thanks
Andres, By default WordPress displays your most recent posts on the front page of your website. You are right about using posts because with posts you can use categories.
If you want some of your posts to remain on the front page then you can use the Sticky Posts feature in WordPress. Another possible solution is to file all the posts you want to stay on the front page in a “Featured Posts” category and then use conditional tags to display your featured posts on top. Some WordPress themes come with built in functionality for featured posts as well.
Thank you for a clear and simple article. I appreciate it! I remain a little confused as to one aspect of posts vs pages – if posts are designed to land on one particular page, does that mean that if we have content that will change, we will need to create some sort of custom coding in order to have different posts land on different pages? Or do we create new pages each time and somehow dispose of the old ones?
I’m working on a new website for our organization – an arts organization. So new information will constantly be created for new events. I’d want that info to display on the appropriate page (say, gallery or performance space). I can see how I could make many pages work that way pretty easily. But I’m unsure of a) how you move that out when its time is done and b) whether that’s the best practice, even if it’s the easiest.
Mary, you can sort your content into categories like gallery, performance space, etc. When creating a post in WordPress you can choose or add categories. You can also add those categories into your site’s main navigation menu.