Understanding Pages

Soooo. In WordPress, you can write either posts or Pages. When you’re writing a regular blog entry, you write a post. Posts, in a default setup, appear in reverse chronological order on your blog’s home page. Pages are for content such as “About,” “Contact,” etc. Pages live outside of the normal blog chronology, and are often used to present timeless information about yourself or your site — information that is always applicable. You can use Pages to organize and manage any content.

In addition to the generally required “About” and “Contact” Pages, other examples of common pages include Copyright, Disclosure, Legal Information, Reprint Permissions, Company Information, and Accessibility Statement.

In general, Pages are very similar to Posts in that they both have Titles and Content and can use your WordPress Theme templates files to maintain a consistent look throughout your site. Pages, though, have several key distinctions that make them quite different from Posts.

What Pages Are:

• Pages are for content that is less time-dependent than Posts.
• Pages can be organized into pages and subpages.
• Pages can use different Page Templates which can include Template Files, Template Tags and other PHP code.
• Pages may have a more complex array of readily available display adjustments when using sophisticated Themes with extensive customization.
• In essence, Pages are for non-blog content. It is possible to remove all or most Posts from a WordPress installation, and thus to create a standard non-blog website.

What Pages are Not:

• Pages are not Posts, nor are they excerpted from larger works of fiction. They do not cycle through your blog’s main page. WordPress Plugins are available to change the defaults if necessary.
• Pages cannot be associated with Categories and cannot be assigned Tags. The organizational structure for Pages comes only from their hierarchical interrelationships, and not from Tags or Categories.
• Pages are not files. They are stored in your database just like Posts are.
• Although you can put Template Tags and PHP code into a Page Template file, you cannot put these into the Page or Post content without a WordPress Plugin like Exec-PHP which overwrites the code filtering process.
• Pages are not included in your site’s feed.
• Pages and Posts may attract attention in different ways from humans or search engines.
• Pages (or a specific post) can be set as a static front page if desired with a separate Page set for the latest blog posts, typically named “blog.”

This article has not been revised since publication.

This post was created by Woffice on June 3, 2018.