In WordPress, both posts and pages are common ways to publish content, but they serve different purposes:
Posts:
- Best for timely, regularly updated content: Use posts for blog entries, news updates, or announcements.
- Organized by date, categories, and tags: Posts appear in reverse chronological order (newest first) and can be browsed by specific categories or tags. This structure helps readers explore related articles and stay up to date.
- Dynamic and evolving: Because posts are time-sensitive, your list of posts naturally grows and changes as you publish more.
Pages:
- Ideal for static, timeless content: Use pages for information that doesn’t need frequent updating, like an About page, Contact page, or Pricing page.
- Organized in a hierarchy: Pages can have parent/child relationships, making it easy to create a logical site structure. Visitors can navigate through your website to find what they need without scrolling through a blog feed.
- Stable and long-term: Pages usually stay consistent over time and don’t rely on categories or tags.
Both posts and pages use the WordPress editor, so adding text, images, and other media is familiar. However, pages often have simpler layouts, while posts may include more formatting and interactive elements to engage readers.
Posts help you share timely content and keep your readers informed, while pages help you present important, lasting information about your site or business in a clear, navigable way.
Posts and pages have different features and settings. For example, posts may have comments enabled by default, whereas pages may not. Posts may also have tags and categories, while pages do not. It’s important to understand these differences when creating content on a WordPress website, as it can help you choose the right content type for your needs.
Posts are used to create blog posts, which are typically chronological and timely. Posts are organized by date and can be commented on and shared on social media. They are meant to be timely much like blog posts.
Pages are used to create static content, such as your website’s homepage, about page, or contact page. Pages are not organized by date and cannot be commented on or shared on social media. Pages are more evergreen and foundational to your site: front pages, contact pages, FAQ pages etc..
The biggest distinction is how they use different templates. Styling a page can be much more unique. If you update the blog template it will affect every blog.
From a templating / theming perspective, in the core of WordPress you will see single.php and post.php. Then you will learn about the loop. The loop is what lists multiple posts and summaries. You will never have a summary of pages. The template hierarchy is very useful, you can read about it here. It’s common that a loop will iterate through relevant posts, but it’s uncommon to find a list of pages. That said, WordPress’ search will usually display both pages and posts in the search results.