WordPress posts & pages – what are the differences?

If you click on the Write menu in WordPress 2.6.x, you’ll have a couple of options.  WordPress “posts” and WordPress “pages” are two options:

Whenever you want to add content to your site, you can create either, but do you create a post, or a page, and why?

Firstly, it is worth mentioning that neither pages nor posts are not files. They are stored in your database  and “created” as they are requested by inserting the database information into the template system to construct the page.

To answer the question of WordPress post v page, we need to consider the differences between these two types of WordPress content.

The original idea was that posts would be used for up-to-the minute information that was added to the blog so that the latest post is at the top of the list, and older posts get pushed down the pecking order.  A blog, after all, was meant to be updated regularly, and you want the most recent information at the top.

This differs from WordPress Pages which are date-independent, more static and don’t change much (if at all).

Here are some of the differences between WordPress posts v pages

• Pages exist outside the “date hierarchy” of posts.  Pages do not have a defined order as they are not chronological like posts.  The date they are published is pretty much irrelevant so ordering pages by date would be a useless exercise (though you can see why it would be important in posts which are chronological in a traditional blog).
• WordPress pages are not assigned to a category
• Pages can be organised into hierarchy with parent and child pages.
• Pages don’t appear in the RSS feeds of your site, so anything you want in your feed should be a post.
• Pages can easily use different page templates, so each page has a different look or feel, whereas posts all use the same template:

If you are creating a blog, and you want to pre-sell an affiliate product, it might make sense to have the affiliate product review written on a page, so that it does not disappear under the new posts that are made to your blog, and you can include a link to the page in the sidebar of every page on your site.  In fact, any page that you expect people to refer back to often will probably be better off served as a page, rather than a post.

Ultimately, the choice is yours.  I build affiliate sites with WordPress (like the site you are currently reading) and only use pages for contact, privacy and disclaimer/Terms pages.  Almost everything else is a post.

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