Often WordPress beginners get confused between Posts and Pages, as WordPress comes with these two Content Types.
As a beginner, you will probably ask:
- What is the difference between the two?
- Why do you need both?
- When should I use posts?
- When should I use pages?
In this Post, we will explain the difference between Posts vs. Pages in WordPress.
What are Posts in WordPress?
Posts are blog content listed in a reverse chronological order (newest content on top). You will see posts listed on your blog page.
If you are using WordPress as a blog, then you will end up using posts for the majority of your website’s content.
You can add and edit your WordPress posts from the ‘Posts’ menu in your dashboard.
Due to their reverse chronological order, your posts are meant to be timely. Older posts are archived based on month and year.
As the posts gets older, the user has to dig deeper to find them. You have the option to organize your posts based on categories and tags.
What are Pages in WordPress?
Pages are static “one-off” type content such as your about page, privacy policy, contact page, etc. While the WordPress database stores the published date of the page, pages are timeless entities.
For example, your about page is not suppose to expire. Sure you can go back and make updates to it, but chances are you will not have about page 2019, about page 2020 etc. Because there is no time and date tied to pages, they are not included in your RSS feeds by default.
You can add and edit pages in WordPress from ‘Pages’ menu in your dashboard.
Pages are not meant to be social in most cases thus do not include social sharing buttons. For example, you probably don’t want others to tweet your privacy policy page in most cases.
Similarly, pages also don’t include comments. You don’t want users to comment on your contact page or your legal disclaimers page. There is an option to enable comments, however, it is disabled by default for your WordPress pages.
WordPress Pages vs. Posts (Key Differences)
To summarise, the key differences between Posts vs Pages in WordPress.
- Posts are timely vs. Pages are timeless.
- Posts are social vs. Pages are NOT.
- Posts are organised using categories and tags vs. Pages are hierarchical and can be organized as child and parent pages.
- Posts are included in RSS feed vs. Pages are not.
- Posts have author and published date vs Pages do not.
