Scenario
You have your brand new shiney website up and running and you are starting to add to content. You are logged into the administration section and are faced with different options and you can’t decide if you should be adding a new post or a new page.
In WordPress, Pages and posts are a “post types”. WordPress has many pre-defined post types, such as pages, posts, attachments and revisions. Each post type serves a particular purpose.
What’s the difference?
Pages
Pages are the core of your website’s static content. They contain the information that describes you, your business, and your mission. A WordPress website can have as many pages as you want or need. Pages can be used to talk about the products or services you offer. Although, pages are not generally used to add new products that will be offered for sale on your website. Products are a different post type that are part of an ecommerce plugin, such as WooCommerce.
Posts
The best way to think about posts is that they are generally along the lines of editorials and are displayed chronologically. For example, your website may have a blog section. To add new articles to your blog, you will add a post. Unlike pages, posts can be assigned categories so that your website’s posts can be separated into different groups. For example, this post is assigned several categories that help to define a little about what type of information is contained within it.
Key Differences
- Posts are periodic content such as in a blog. Pages are static documents.
- Pages can have parent pages. For example, our SEO page is the parent of several sub-pages that talk about different aspects of SEO. Posts do not have parents.
- Posts can be sorted into categories. Pages do not have categories.
- Most websites have pages but do not necessarily have posts.
Next Steps
When the time comes to add new content to your website, add a page if your goal is to expand the core of the website such as adding an About Us page. If you are adding a new article, such as explaining the differences between pages and posts, then add a Post.