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.
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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.