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Stephanie Leary

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Posts vs. Pages

August 3, 2009 Stephanie Leary Leave a Comment

Should you use posts or pages for your content? On the surface, they are much the same in WordPress. They share a similar editing screen1. Both can accept comments and trackbacks. How do you decide which is best for you?

If your site contains a blog of any variety — a podcast, a press release archive, etc. — you should definitely use posts for that section. Putting the rest of your content into pages will provide a logical division for both your visitors and your content authors.

If no such clear division exists, think about these aspects of your site:

Taxonomy.
Pages do not have tags or categories. They can be arranged in a parent/child hierarchy, but if you need a more complex or flexible taxonomy, posts would probably work better.

Time.
Is the date or time a crucial piece of information about your content? Is your article likely to be superceded later by a newer version? A post might make more sense.

Subscribers.
Would your readers want to be notified when you add a document? If so, your content should go into posts, since pages are not included in feeds.

1 Except for excerpts, which are for posts only. However, you can easily use them for pages as well with a plugin such as PJW Page Excerpt or Excerpt Editor.

WordPress excerpts, Posts and Pages, strategy, subscribers, taxonomy

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I’m a front end developer at Equinox OLI, working on open source library software. I was previously a freelance WordPress developer in higher education. You can get in touch here or on LinkedIn.

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