Creating pages in WordPress is nearly the same as creating posts. However, there are some differences in the concepts and how they work. From this article, we will help you understand in detail about pages, when to create one, how to set them up in WordPress, and how it works.
Concept
Pages are standalone and static pieces of content that you add to your website. They are not displayed in any archive or content stream. Unlike posts, they are only organized as parent-child relationships, which means they have no categories or tags.
The pages are rarely displayed with the author or published date and time attached to them. In short, they are a different type of content altogether. So, how do you know when to create a page instead of a post?
It depends on whether you want it to be available as the main menu item or not. You can decide whether it is a post or a page by looking at the type of content.
Pages are typically permanent content that is static and is not updated so frequently. Examples of pages can be a home page, an about page, or a contact page. The pages include a summary of specific types of content on the site, a summary of products and services, a bio of contributors, or, in the case of a company, a bio of staff. We can find many WordPress sites that mainly contain pages or can even contain pages only. For example, a college website would probably have most pages, with blog posts just for quick updates regarding new admission, etc. A company website would typically have pages, with a blog related to news, promotions, and any events.
Creating a Page in WordPress
From the WordPress toolbar, you can go to New and select Page, or from the back end, go to Pages and select Add New. Both these options will take you to the Page editor which looks a lot like the Post editor.
Now, in the editor section, you can add a page title, write content, and add images or media according to your requirement. You can either schedule or immediately Publish your Page. You can easily differentiate between Posts and Pages by looking at the panel on the right. Instead of categories and tags, we have a panel called Page Attributes where you can change the Page template and the Page hierarchy.
If you are using the latest version of WordPress, the pages do not have a comment section by Default. If you want comments on Pages, you can actively open the Screen Options go to the Discussion panel, and check Allow comments on Pages.
Once your page is created and published, you can click View Page from the front end. You can see the page is already created with featured images and content. You can see that Pages work exactly like posts and it is being displayed nicely on your website.
Default Template in 2020 theme
This theme has been designed to take full advantage of flexibility at its core. If you haven’t activated this theme, you can do it now. You can see the content part with some width of the container.
If you have created pages with a 2020 theme and if you want to edit those pages, you will see that in the Page Attributes panel, you have the Parent field and the Template. Your template is set to Default Template, but you can change this either to a Cover Page Template or a Full-Width Page Template. You can click on the update once you change the template and view the page to simply look at it from the front.
You will see cover page content or full-width content with a featured image above the content below the Page title. So, by using this Custom Page Template, you can change the look of a specific page to display separate content or separate layouts from other existing Pages of the site. These Custom Page Templates are theme dependent. It might not be available in all the themes. You can test them out to see what they do and how they work because there are different options there.
Creating page hierarchies
Another unique feature of pages is how they relate to each other. Posts are related through their categories, tags, author, and publishing date and time, while pages are only related through parent-child relationships. You might be wondering what a parent-child relationship means.
A parent-child relationship simply means hierarchy between our pages. To create this relationship, all we have to do is go to the page attributes panel on the right-hand side. You can see parent, but, by default, it will be set to no parent. But if you have pages created earlier, you can use the drop-down to set one of the existing pages as the parent of a page.
Once you create a page, it always lands on the root of your domain. But after you change it to parent, and click save a draft, you’ll see that the URL structure changes to show the page hierarchy. Not only us but search engines and other types of engines that come into your site will easily understand these structures. However, if you want the navigation to be clearer between the pages, you have to add links within the pages themselves.
The hierarchy should be understandable by the users of our site so we also have to add a custom menu to our site showing structural hierarchy. This will be shared in our next video and blog. However, with most of the themes available for WordPress, there will already be a menu in place on your site. And if you have not done any custom settings for your menus, the structural hierarchies will already be in place. So, if you’re using a different theme from the 2020 theme, you’re probably going to see that the page already has a drop-down menu. There is a lot to learn about structural hierarchies.
This chapter is explained more in detail in our tutorial videos.
You can find below, the link to our WordPress Tutorial Part 4:
Creating a Page
Tutorial in English
We shall talk more about WordPress in our next tutorials and blogs.
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