WordPress Post Vs Page - How Do They Differ?
As a beginner seeking to create content in WordPress, you may get confused between posts and pages and when to utilize each. You need to understand the uses for both since each is important when creating content for your WordPress site. The terms cannot be used interchangeably since they relate to different types of information found on your WordPress site.
This article will help you decipher these differences and uses for pages and posts. The information will help you build a WordPress site that your readers can navigate easily and eventually get you more traffic.
What Are Pages?
Pages are reserved for crucial information about your site that does not change. It helps your readers to learn more about yourself and what your site entails. Such WordPress pages include the About Me or Contact Us page.
The information found in pages is timeless and does not change. They do not have a publish date nor author, unlike posts. Pages are located in the primary navigation menu on your site, and they make your website user-friendly to the readers.
Pages are designed to inform the visitors to your site about your products or services. They do not offer an interactive section where the readers can comment, although this can be modified if it’s an advertisement page for a product or a service. You are advised to create just a few pages on the essential information you want to pass to your site visitors so that they find it easy to understand and manage.
Elements of a Page
- Page Title
The page title informs the reader of the purpose of the page.
- Content
The content is the information you write on the page to be read by the site’s visitors.
- Comment
By default and by a common standard, comments are not activated on pages, but they can be enabled. It is not recommended that your readers engage you on your website page, although you can turn on this functionality. Consequently, you can leave a call to action to encourage them to engage in discussions on your posts.
Common Examples of Pages
- About Us
The About Us page is the most crucial page of your site. Readers want to know your story and relate to the content you are creating. People often write about their personal experiences, especially traumatizing events in their life, or give tips on something they have been successful in.
In this case, a reader will be interested in knowing you and will find this information on the About Us page. A company can also use this space to write its story, from its foundation to its success story.
- Contact
You provide contact information of your address, phone number, and email that your audience can use to contact you.
- Privacy Policies
Individual’s private information is crucial and cannot be used without their consent. The privacy policy on your website informs your readers of how you will handle their data, such as name, phone number, email, address, IP address, or any other data you can identify them with. The privacy policy helps you declare how you will use this information as regulated by national or international guidelines in your original country.
Your users can request to see the information you have gathered about them and ask you to delete it. You cannot use it to publish statistics, and your users will feel protected to engage in your blog post if they think that their private information is secure.
- Disclaimer Page
You must add a disclaimer page if you use your WordPress blog to earn an income. This will inform your readers how you make money when you promote affiliate products or display banner ads on your blog.
- Terms Of Service Page
This page is essential for people or companies who offer services or run an online store on their blogs. It helps you limit liability on services and information provided by your site when the same is not appropriately used and misleads other people.
Your audience is informed of their responsibility towards your trademark and copyright and how they can utilize your product, website, or services.
- Write For Us Page
You need a write for us page if you are running a multi-author word press blog. It will help users to discover the writing opportunity on your website and apply. You can use this space to inform them of the type of content you are looking for and what your blog entails.
You need to add a contact form for the users to get in contact with you.
- Advertise Page
Besides blogging for fun and providing in-depth information on a topic you are familiar with, it would feel awesome to get compensated for your time and effort. You can earn through your blog by signing up for Google AdSense or sell the ad spots directly to the marketers.
The advertising page will inform the marketers of available ad spots on your website and its traffic. A contact form at the end of your website will help the advertisers contact you.
- Home Page
The first page that a visitor to your site sees is known as a home page. It differs depending on the theme and type of website you are using, and you can customize this information. The home page can display information about your business, the products and services you are offering, your mission, and a call to action to urge your customers to “Order now.”
When creating your site, select a theme that has a unique home page template. This will help you customize it for a more appropriate homepage for business than just a simple list of blog posts synonymous with most websites.
What Are Posts?
Posts are the new entries of content that you publish on your WordPress site for the perusal of your readers. They are often articles or updates of original information to a previous post you had written and are listed in reverse chronological order. This means that your readers see your latest content at the top of your page.
WordPress posts are syndicated through the RSS feeds since they have an official publication date. This helps to alert the readers of your most recent content entries.
Additionally, this allows the content creator to use Aweber, Constant Contact, or MailChimp to deliver email broadcasts to their subscriber.
Elements of a Post
- Post Title
The post title is the topic of the content you will be writing. It is supposed to capture your readers’ attention and make them yearn to read on throughout your post. You can research how to write catchy headlines that are SEO optimized, which helps rate your blog posts.
- Date Published
Your post will automatically display the date when you publish it at the top of the post.
- Writer
Once you publish your post, it will display your name as the author. This is the username information you give when creating your site. In the case of different authors to your site, you can adjust this in the settings of your website.
- Comments
Posts have a comment section that enables readers to post their thoughts on the topic of your article. This helps connect with your audience, act on the feedback they give you, and improve your content.
- Content
Content is what you will be writing on and passing to your readers as information.
- Categories
Categories make your site user-friendly, whereby your readers can navigate easily through the topics you’ve written about and choose what they want to read.
- Tags
Tags break down the categories and provide more insightful information about a topic.
Difference between Pages and Posts
WordPress posts and pages may look identical since they use a similar editor to add images, text, and other media when creating their content. However, they have four distinguishing features that make them different.
- Posts are Timely While Pages are Timeless
Pages do not feature a publication date, unlike posts that have this information displayed at the beginning of the post. The information found in the pages of your site does not need a regular update; thus, they have timeless content.
On the other hand, your posts may become irrelevant after a while, and you will need to update, delete or archive them for readers who might still be interested in the information.
- Posts are Timely While Posts are Personalized, While Pages are Universal
Each post on your website will display the author, category, and tags at the top or bottom of the post, depending on the selected theme. This helps your audience relate to each author of the posts on your site, especially if you have different contributors.
Pages do not display the author’s name because this information is not essential to the reader. It does not matter who published the report since it is only meant to introduce the reader to your site. Most importantly, this information is supposed to display your website as an entity instead of personal information about you as an individual.
- Use of Categories and Tags for Organization
It’s recommended that you use categories and tags in your posts to keep your content organized. This helps your readers find the information they want more easily than browsing the whole post when they only need a specific topic.
For example, if you are writing about an automobile, one of your categories might be “Tires.” The tags would include “Tire sizes” or “Tire depth.”
In contrast, pages are organized hierarchically, and they do not use tags and categories. In this case, you use parent and child pages to group your information. However, if you need to use tags and categories, you can add them using a plugin.
- Social Engagement In Posts Vs. Pages
You want to know the views of your audience after reading your posts. This will help you identify what to improve on or the parts you can edit or remove from the post. You can only do this through your posts where the comments section is enabled by default, although you can disable it.
Your readers can also share the content of your posts in their social media posts since many themes allow that. You can also help your audience stay up to date with your posts by distributing them through RSS feeds.
Pages are not interactive, and their comments section is usually disabled, although you can enable it. This is because it is not appropriate for people to comment on your About Us page since this is static information that is rarely updated.
Other Content Types
The type of content you create for your site will determine how much traffic it will get. You can create different types of content depending on the information you want to pass across to various audiences.
1. Infographics
Infographics provide an opportunity of presenting information in a more detailed manner to ensure your audience understands the concept. Such data can range from sequential, cause and effect, or statistics type of information.
Infographics help to explain content that is difficult to explain through writing. It is easy and fun to create infographics, and the image produced is interesting that can be shared through social media. Additionally, you will get credit for your presentation that will increase traffic to your website.
2. Longform Content
Longform content is the ultimate guide to related information regularly searched on the internet. They can range between 5,000-20,000 words and offer immense value to the readers since they cover all topics of a subject. You need to break down the guides into intelligible sections and advertise them heavily so that users can easily find them.
3. E-Books
E-Books are a great way to convey information at a pace that your readers can comprehend. The ultimate goal of an e-book is to offer value to the reader, even if it’s ten or a hundred pages long. You can seek the help of a freelance writer to help you create an e-book since it can be a daunting process.
E-books are easy to host on a website when optimized for viewing both on mobile and computer screens. They offer relatively appealing and straightforward visuals to educate or entertain the readers on a particular topic.
4. Online Polls or Surveys
A company can engage its audience through brief and interactive online surveys. In this way, the organization can obtain information about its audience and use the feedback to improve its products and services. The surveys should be fun and interactive to compel the users to participate.
5. Videos
Videos added to a blog post make it more engaging and user-friendly to your audience. This is because some people prefer watching to reading text, and it explains content better. You can upload these videos on YouTube and embed them in your blog post so that it’s easier to use them in content marketing.
Is a Page or a Post Better for SEO?
SEO content in both pages and posts can be used to draw traffic to a website. Search engines do not care whether it is a post or a page as long as it has keywords that are high in search demand. In this case, your posts can do better in the short term, while your page does better in the long term.
Website pages do not have in-depth information on the specific topic being searched; thus may rank lightly in search engines. This is why posts are considered to be more SEO friendly because they contain more keywords. Besides, they are linked with tags and categories that expose them more to search engines.
Search engines prefer timeless content that is found on pages and is more organized. Therefore, they rank better for SEO because they contain topics that are highly searched. On the other hand, blog posts expound on the subjects found on the website’s pages, and this information will keep on changing.
Search engines rank highest for what adds value to the users. Pages get better with time since it’s the first landing point to the information the reader wants. Blog posts are updated with information that may not contain the keywords the reader is searching for.
In short, it doesn’t really matter for SEO, so much as it matters for your individual marketing team and existing processes. There is no hard and fast rule for whether to use a post or a page.
Which One Should You Use?
It is recommended that you use both posts and pages to rank in the search engines. You can emphasize the keywords on your website pages since they remain static. Your website posts will eventually become too old and get archived while the information on your page does not change.
Pages provide a comprehensive guide for parent topics, thus obtain lots of links, unlike posts that rarely rank for competitive head terms. Blog posts are more straightforward and can only rank long-tail keywords frequently. Therefore, it is recommended that you use website pages to rank for head terms and optimize your search engine.
