A page in WordPress usually refers to the page post type. It is one of the default pre-defined WordPress post types.
WordPress started out as simple blogging tool which allowed users to write posts. In the year 2005, Pages were introduced in WordPress version 1.5 to allow users to create static pages that were not part of their blog posts. For example, an about page, contact page, legal info, etc.
Some of the key differences between posts and pages are:
- Posts are timely content part of a series of posts in a blog. Pages are static one-off type of documents which are not tied to the blog’s reverse chronological order of content
- Pages can be hierarchical, which means a page can have sub pages, for example a parent page titled “About us” can have a sub-page called “Our history”. On the other hand posts are not hierarchical.
- By default posts in WordPress can be sorted into taxonomies Categories and Tags. Pages do not have categories or tags
- Pages can utilize custom page templates. Posts can not utilize this feature by default in WordPress.
- WordPress posts are displayed in RSS feeds while Pages are excluded from feeds.
There is no limit on how many pages you create in WordPress and it is possible to create a website with only pages and not using posts at all. Even though pages are supposed to have static content, but that does not mean users can not update them. Pages can be updated as often as user want to update them.
Users can also use a page to be the static front page of their website and have their blog posts displayed on another page of the site. To choose static front page and blog page, a user need to enable static front page on Settings » Reading under ‘Front page displays’ option.
This post was originally published in the wpbeginner glossary.
