What’s The Difference Between WordPress Pages And WordPress Posts?
To quote Steve Martin about the French, “it’s like they have a different word for EVERYTHING!”.
That’s a problem with technical talk, too.
If you deal online, then you know the terminology of the Web, like web pages.
If you work with WordPress, however, there’s a twist: pages are posts and posts are pages.
Sort of.
The problem is that WordPress has two fundamental web page displays on the blog - posts and pages (we’ll ignore utility web pages like the multi-post home page, or archive and category listings for now).
Simply put, a PAGE is a static amount of text without a specific date or time displayed. A POST is tied up with a date and time.
And to confuse it more, a WEBPAGE is what both of them are!
So if you visit a typical blog, the home ‘page’ is actually a webpage of posts - blog entries organized by date.
And if you click on a link for ‘About Me’ or ‘Contact’ on the sidebar, you’ll go to a page, not a post.
Why should this matter?
Because WordPress manages these differently:
- Most themes include a date for posts, but not for pages, making the latter ideal for static text, like contact information, and the former, for time-based information.
- Pages are not included in permalinks, so if you are creating a custom permalink to add keywords to your URL (a popular search engine optimization technique) it won’t do work for pages.
- Posts are grouped according to categories, and organized by publish date. Posts aren’t.
- And posts are displayed on the main webpage ordered by date (of course, to confuse matters more, you CAN choose to display a single page on the front webpage, and avoid displaying the posts list!)
So pages are best used for utility items, such as contact info, about page, so on, and posts for the main blog content.
A bit tricky and non-intuitive - but keeping the terminology straight helps with understanding (and explaining) your WordPress blog!
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