03 Apr What is the Difference Between Posts vs Pages in WordPress?

When, I started my journey with WordPress, six months ago,

I was confused how the Posts and Pages worked.

And when I understood how they worked — the real doubt started at that moment. For some time, I thought that they offer the same type of functionality, with different names — and that lead me to research on my own the difference between Posts vs Pages in WordPress.

Today, I am going to help beginners understand the difference between the posts and pages in WordPress, the scenarios one should use posts and pages and technically what are the difference between the two terms.

WordPress is amazingly user-friendly and that’s one of the reasons why it has reached such heights in the past few years. With extreme easy to use CMS, great dashboard and a great platform for developers to harness its customizability. With a great community, the platform offers tons of free plugins and themes — the ecosystem is what makes the journey worthwhile.

Without wasting much time, let’s start our journey of finding the difference between pages and posts in a simplistic way.

Understanding Content Types

WordPress comes with two content types, pages, and posts. These two content types offer a similar type of functionality all over the WordPress, but there are key differences that one should take into account.

Let’s get started with each one of them one by one.

Posts

With Posts, you can easily curate content and keep them updated in the longer run. Posts are generally used for content creation that can be commented upon and shared with other potential readers. Posts can easily make up the majority of the website — with emphasis on shareable, updated content.

The posts are shared on the homepage in reversed chronological order with emphasis on the latest post. This is important for blogs as they are all about updated and new content.

WordPress archives Posts on a regular basis and it depends on the settings of the blog. Normally, they are archived on monthly or yearly basis. Archiving is an important feature of WordPress, but we will cover it in our later posts.

Using Categories and Tags Effectively

Posts are the basic content type of WordPress as it offers the option to share and create wonderful content for your blog that thrives on interactivity. With the use of categories and tags, you can cluster similar types of post content within your blog.

The categories provide a specialized meaning to the posts and are strictly under that notion of the category. In laymen terms, the blog category defines its boundaries. For example, at 85 Ideas, plugin reviews fall in Plugins category, creating the right way to cluster similar types of blog posts.

You can also use multiple categories for a single post if it does not fit into one category. For example, a list of useful plugins can be put into both plugins and list category.

The Tags, on the other hand, provides the right way to input keywords into the posts. The tags can also cluster similar types of posts and enables users to find the right topic according to the search. Tag Cloud are a popular way to showcase the important articles on the keyword.

You can easily use category and tags to add similar types of posts on a single page.

More on Posts

With Posts and role of categories and tags defined, let’s understand more about posts and their role in enhancing the blog.

Because Posts are listed according to the time of the post, they can easily be sent through RSS feeds. With RSS feeds, users can easily get notified about the new posts or changes in the older posts. This is very important feature that the webmasters/bloggers can utilize in creating email broadcasts by using 3rd party plugins such as MailChimp and Aweber.

Posts syndication are useful for bloggers in many ways. They can easily create a newsletter with all the information that is stacked with the posts. The readers love newsletters and we will soon come up with how to build a newsletter in next few weeks.

Newsletters are also useful to leverage social media as people are more likely to engage with the content. The posts, on the other hand, can be tagged with social media sharing plugins providing the right platform for content sharing.

With all the right tools and techniques, posts hold a great promise to build up the website reputation as it enables visitors to comment or share the content, further improving the reach of the website and its revenue model.

Pages

Pages are more like static content in action. Typical examples for pages of a website are homepage, contact us, about us and more. These pages hold equal value to posts, but they lack interactivity and social sharing. Another aspect that

Another aspect that differentiates pages from a post is pages are timeless entries and cannot be feed to RSS. But, they can be feed into RSS in other ways.

The lack of interactivity is due to the fact that no one wants to share the disclaimer page or the about us page. No one really care about these pages. But, do not confuse the need for those pages against their social media requirements.

Pages are important because of their hierarchical nature. They simplify the navigation of the website, which is an important factor in Google rankings and retention of the user.

The current WordPress themes come with custom pages, which can be customized according to your requirements. Moreover, the drag and drop themes comes with the right set of the functionalities to create a visually appealing web page. Landing pages can also be created using the drag and drop plugins. Other than that the general usage includes creating galleries and other visually appealing pages.

Pages can be ordered and are a vital part of any website.

Other facts about posts/pages

• You can create unlimited number of posts and pages, no limitation.
• Search Engines love organized material. It’s important for you to understand the difference between posts and pages.
• Pages provide custom templates, whereas posts lack custom templates

Wrap Up: Where from here?

We discussed posts and pages and their differences. We also discussed when to use them and their importance in search engine optimization.

If you have any question regarding posts and pages, comment below and let us know.