The difference between a page and a post in Wordpress is actually quite significant as they have different purposes and are used in different ways.
These differences therefore need to be considered when you are designing your site, even though they are both used to add content and both the visual and html editors used to create them in the Wordpress admin dashboard are the same.
As you now know there are 2 types of content (posts and pages) that you can add to your Wordpress site and I will detail what they are and the differences between them below…
Wordpress Pages
Pages in Wordpress are just like the web pages you would find on any traditional website created using html in a web builder such as Dreamweaver, Frontpage or XSitePro.
Once created they are usually referenced and linked to from a Menu bar or Side bar and in this way create navigation through out the site. By default as pages are created they will be normally added to the main menu area for the site.
Parent and Subpages
Any page created in Wordpress can have a Parent Page, which must have already been created, which therefore adds to the page hierarchy and structure of the site.
Pages can be also be ordered to determine their position in a menu relative to other pages in that menu.
Typical standard pages that you might always see on any Wordpress website or blog are ABOUT, CONTACT, PRIVACY and WEBSITE TERMS pages.
Wordpress Pages are seperate from and different than Wordpress posts and are controlled from separate areas with the Wordpress dashboard.
Important Information
Pages normally contain content that you want your website visitors to have quick and easy access to from your home page.
Unlike the posts, Pages do not have Categories or Tags and do not appear in your websites RSS feed.
Therefore if you add a new page to your site your RSS subscribers will not know that you have done so.
One way around this is to announce the new page by writing a new post as well to tell your subscribers about it.
Building Traditional Websites With Wordpress
If you just use Wordpress Pages to build your website you can use this technique to create sites that look just like traditional websites and no-one would know that they were build with Wordpress!
This is why Wordpress is so great as you have the total flexibility to create just a website or just a blog or both all in one website and using the same free software!
Posts vs Pages
In the screen grab of this website shown below PAGES are listed as links along the horizontal Menu Bar at the top of the home page (Home, Training, Free Install, Plugins etc) and the most recent POST is displayed as the content at the top of the home page (What’s the Difference etc) :
Wordpress Posts
Posts are the content you write to the blog (or weblog) part of your Wordpress website.
The Wordpress software was originally written as a blogging platform and is used by millions of bloggers throughout the world just for this purpose alone.
Blog Posts are Date Stamped!
The full name for a post is a Blog Post and this in itself describes their history and purpose. Whenever you have something new to say to your sites visitors or readers you just write a new post to get the news out.
Posts are displayed in reverse chronological (date) order, so that normally and by default the most recent post is displayed first on your home page with old posts displayed below it.
There are benefits and disadvantages to this in that it is great that your more recent information is always displayed on the home page, but as a result the older posts eventually disappear completely from the home page (it can only hold so much information!).
Why Recent Posts?
This is why you often see a list of recent posts linked to in a sidebar on Wordpress sites, so that visitors can still find them. However as more new posts are added much older posts will fall off the bottom of the recent posts lists as well and they they can be hard to find.
But that’s the ways blogs work and often visitors will arrive at one of your ‘hidden’ posts via the search engines, so they still have great value!
Wordpress Tags and Categories
Wordpress posts can have both tags a categories.
Tags and Categories are important for SEO, so you should always add them!
TAGS
A tag is basically just a label that is really a short description of some part of the blog post content, so that it’s general content can be easily determined by a casual observer.
Usually you should only add about 5 tags per post (so you don’t seem spammy!) and you should make sure that the tags you use are as varied and different as possible.
Example: wordpress pages, wordpress posts, posts vs pages, wordpress post pages differences, wordpress content
CATEGORIES
Wordpress categories are there so you can group similar posts together.
For instance the category for this post might be “Wordpress Content”, and I then wrote another post on how to write content in Wordpress, I could give it the same category.
You should only apply one category to a single post (although Wordpress allows you to do more). This is for better on-site SEO for your website as it produces a siloing-effect (all similar posts in the same silo or category) which the search engines prefer and this should help your site rank better.
Example: Wordpress Content
RSS Feed
Posts always appear in the RSS Feed that is provided with every Wordpress website (whereas pages do not).
This is one of the major advantages of Wordpress as your visitors can subscribe to your RSS feed either using a RSS Feed reader on their own computer or via email.
When some subscribes then every time you write a new post it will automatically be sent to all your RSS subscribers and they will receive the post content as an email or in their RSS reader depending upon which option they selected when they subscribed.
Note that subscribing by email usually requires you to add some extra funtionality to your site, but it is very easy to do and I will write another post soon to explain how to do this.
The Ultimate Content Management System
With the combined power of both posts and pages to create content Wordpress has got the reputation of being the ultimate CMS or content management system and as a result it’s popularity among both web designers and bloggers continues to increase significantly.
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