Pages vs. Posts

One of the most common questions I get from clients when I first walk them through their WordPress installation is, “what is the difference between pages and posts?” Good question.

I like to think of pages as more static, containing information less likely to change, and posts as more ephemeral or “time-sensitive”. The About Us page on a company’s website is a good example of page content. While it may be updated as a company grows and evolves, that probably happens fairly infrequently. Posts on the other hand, depending on how often you create them, can be considered more up-to-date information; like content about an upcoming event or a current piece of news.

There are some other key differences between pages and posts that you should take into consideration when determining how the content in your WordPress site is organized. If your site has a blog page, posts are automatically listed there in reverse chronological order (from newest to oldest). Posts are also automatically displayed in the blog RSS feed for your site, on the Archive page, and anywhere Categories, Recent Posts, and other post-related widgets are displayed. For organizational purposes, posts can have both categories and tags applied to them. Pages on the other hand do not use tags or categories. But, for organizing page content, you can make any page a parent of any other. As an example, an About Us page could be the parent for both a Founders and Board Members page, so they appear under About Us in your navigation.

There are no limits to the amount of pages or posts that your site can contain.

Check out the WordPress support site for more detailed information on creating and editing pages and posts.