In WordPress, you will find that the amazing piece of online software comes with two basic ways to create content—Posts and Pages. Although, they might look and even function in a similar fashion to a lot of people, posts and pages in WordPress have their own set of differences. They should be used for a separate purpose because they were meant to host different type of content with texts, images, and other media.
It should be noted that they have a lot of similarities. The visual and text editor for both of them are basically the same, the way they are presented on the website can also be exactly the same; they can have a title and a body, comments and public discussions, featured images, can be scheduled, drafted etc. These similarities might confuse a lot of WordPress administrators but once you get to using them, you will see how they were created to serve different functions and content.
In this post, we analyze the difference between posts and pages in WordPress. So, what are they? Let’s find out.
Posts vs. Pages in WordPress
| Posts | Pages | |
| 1. | Posts are meant to host periodic content. They are more dynamic. New posts are supposed to replace the old ones. That is why they are sorted according to date. | Pages are more static, meaning the content remains the same and are linked from different areas of the website. They are not sorted by date. |
| 2. | Posts are placed, sorted and linked in the homepage, archive or category pages based on the date they were published. New posts come up on the top while the old ones go below and the list might extend to multiple pages. | Usually, pages are manually linked from different areas of the site. Links to them are placed in the header, footer, menu and sidebar(s). In a way, they are like permanent posts. |
| 3. | Posts must belong to at least one category. The default or ‘uncategorized’ category is used if nothing is selected. Tags are optional for them. | Pages neither have categories nor tags. |
| 4. | They do not support custom templates without the use of special plugins. Categories can be styled different though. | They support custom templates. If themes have those special files that specify the design, such templates can be applied to them directly to each unique page. |
| 5. | If the theme supports it, special formats can be chosen for posts—Standard, Aside, Image, Video, Quote, Link, Gallery, Status, Audio and Chat. Not all WordPress themes implement any or all of these formats. | Formats cannot be implemented for pages. |
| 6. | Some themes make use of excerpts to display hand-crafted summaries for your content. | Excerpts are not applicable to them. |
| 7. | Trackbacks can be sent and received by posts. It is a means of notifying blogs and sites that they have been linked or they have linked to external content. | Pages don’t support trackbacks and pings. |
| 8. | They are ordered on the basis of categories and tags chronologically. | Pages are ordered alphabetically but can be given the order attribute which is a numerical value that overrides the default sort order. |
| 9. | They don’t support hierarchies. | Pages can have hierarchies meaning one page can be the child of another. These levels will impact on their permalink and how they are listed in, for instance, menus. |
| 10. | Example: Daily blog posts about the latest happenings. | Examples: The About Us, Terms of Service, Our Members, Our Clients, Privacy Policy etc. pages. |