Quick Comparison: Posts vs. Pages
Although there are always some exceptions to every rule, primarily the differences are…
- Posts are timely vs. Pages are timeless, static content.
- Posts are listed in chronological order vs. Pages are not.
- Posts can be categorized and tagged vs. Pages are hierarchical.
- Posts are included in RSS feed vs. Pages are not.
- Posts are social vs. Pages are not.
- Pages can use custom templates vs. Posts can not.
If you are interested in some more detail, read on.
Posts
Think of posts as a journal or news entries.
Posts are listed in reverse chronological order. Due to their reverse chronological order, posts are meant to be timely. The very timely nature of posts make it extremely social. Posts encourage conversation. They have a built-in commenting feature.
If you have created any sticky posts, those will appear before any other posts.
Post Characteristics:
Categories and Tags
Categories and tags can help visitors navigate your site.
Posts of a similar theme or thread can be filed in categories. Think of Categories as the Table of Contents of a book. For example, this post will be placed in the category Tips & Tricks. Any post can be put into several categories, providing the content is relevant.
Posts can also contain tags. Think of tags as the Index of a book (or if you prefer, keywords). The idea is to help site visitors find very specific content on your website, so the more posts you publish the more useful this might become. For example appropriate tags for this post could include: posts, pages, categories and even the word tags itself.
You can publish posts without any tags, though they will always be categorised. If you haven’t put your post into a specific category, WordPress will automatically add it to the ‘Uncategorized’ category.
RSS Feeds
Posts can also be subscribed to through RSS feeds. RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds are potentionally very powerful as they allow you to deliver or ‘feed’ your content to your audience automatically, without them having to come to your site to look for it.
Your site visitors can sign up to the feed directly from most web browsers (notably not Chrome), feed readers, email clients and many other devices and services.
Social Media
Due to the timely nature of posts, Posts are particularly social media-friendly (providing the content itself is good of course).
Discussion
Posts are also intended to encourage discussion. By default, WordPress has a ‘Leave a Reply’ panel at the bottom of each post. However, if you don’t want your visitors to comment you can remove the option via the Settings > Discussion section of the dashboard or when in a Post scroll down and locate the Discussion metabox (if not visible open Screen Options and ensure Discussion checked). Uncheck Allow comments.
Posts are normally made up of:
- Post Title – tells the reader what the post is about.
- Date published – all posts usually display the date a post was published.
- Written by – most themes display the name of the post author.
- Your post content – this is the text written and media added that you want to share with your visitors.
- Categories – are used to help readers locate similar posts on your blog. Categories are often used like a Table of Contents of a book; they provide a general overview of the topics you blog about.
- Tags – are used to help readers locate posts on your blog. Tags are more like the index at the back of the book and explode the topic into a million bits.
- Comments – if enabled this is where your readers ‘Leave a Reply’ in response to your post.
Pages
Pages are meant to be static, where the the content can be edited but actually doesn’t change very often, for example About Us, Contact Us, Services pages or Privacy Policy etc.
The page itself is normally visible on your site’s navigation menu.
As pages are intended to be timeless they are not listed by date, they can’t be categorised, there isn’t the facility to tag them and they aren’t associated with your RSS feed by default.
There is the functionality to comment on a Page in WordPress but this option is often disabled (though you can always override that). Usually you will not want visitors to make a comment about your Contact Us page, Privacy Policy or similar pages.
Pages, unlike posts, have a hierarchy structure, so you can have sub pages. For example Services could have the sub pages Midwifery, Massage, Acupuncture.
Most WordPress themes also provide a number of different page templates such as ‘Gallery’, ‘Sitemap’ or ‘Landing’ which change the look and feel of a Page. These cannot be used on Posts.
Pages are normally made up of:
- Page Title – tells the reader what the page is about.
- Your page content – this is the text written and media added that you want to share with your visitors.
