You may be wondering what the difference is between pages and post and how to categorize them in WordPress.
Or maybe you want to learn more about how to categorize your posts with Categories and Tags?
In this tutorial I’m going to cover this and set up the structure of the website with pages and posts.
After that I will explain how to set a page as the homepage for the website.
So let’s get started right away!
Watch tutorial on YouTube
WordPress Pages and Posts differences
It’s good to know that every website consists of one or more Pages and often in combination with multiple Posts.
First let me explain what the differences are between Posts and Pages in WordPress.
Basically, with Posts you have more options to categorize them compared to Pages and that’s about it.
The extra options are:
- Categories
- Tags
- Excerpt
For example you can categorize Posts with Categories and Tags and for Pages you don’t have those options.
You can use these extra options to make it easier for visitors to navigate and find relevant information on the website. I will show you how that works in a few seconds.
Posts also have the Excerpt option, and here you can give a brief description of what the post is about. It is optional to use this, if you do not enter anything then a part of the first paragraph on the page will be used automatically.
But you don’t have to use the Excerpt option anyway because there is a helpful plugin which i will show you later, that you can use to optimize you Pages and Posts for the search engines.
Pages are mainly used for the basic pages of a website such as the homepage, contact page, about us page etc.
Keep in mind that Pages have fewer options for categorizing them. That is why these are often used for standard pages such as the homepage, contact page, about us page, etc.
And Posts are used to share information or news on relevant topics for your website and have extra options Categories and Tags to categorize them.
How to set up Categories and Tags will be explained in a few seconds. On the image below you can see where Posts and Pages sections are listed in the WordPress navigation menu.
If you click on Posts in the dashboard you can see that the post Hello World! already is created automatically by WordPress. When you hover over the title you will see a few options appear. By clicking on View you can have a look at the default design of the post.
I will show you this so you can get a better idea of how everything works.
As you can see in the image below the design looks terrible at the moment if you ask me, but all that will be adjusted later on.
If you want to go back to the WordPress dashboard you can do so by clicking on the WordPress icon (W) at the left in the menu bar.
By clicking on Pages you can see that a Privacy Policy and a Sample page also have been created automatically. If you hover over the title you will see the options pop up and you can also have a look at this page by clicking on View.
It’s of course not necessary to view the default pages as we’re going to delete them in a few seconds, and the whole default design layout for the website will be completely changed later with another Theme and a Plugin.
But I just want to show you everything to help you get a clear picture on how the whole process is working and you understand what is happening. So below you can see how the sample page is displayed by default.
If you want to go back to the WordPress dashboard again you just have to click on the WordPress icon that is displayed in the black menu bar.
Set up Pages and Posts structure
Now I want to create 3 Pages and 3 Posts:
- Home (page)
- About us (page)
- Contact (page)
- Top 3 luxury watch brands for men (post)
- Top 3 luxury watch brands for women (post)
- The best affordable luxury watch brands you need to check out! (post)
This is very easy to do in just a couple of clicks.
Of course you can create as many pages and Posts as you would like to.
It’s ofcourse also possible to add or delete Posts or Pages later on.
Add new Pages
So let’s start off with the Pages. Therefore you need to go to Pages in the navigation menu.
Now go to the Privacy Policy and Sample page that have been created automatically by WordPress and remove both of them by hovering over them and click on Trash.
Also permanently delete both pages by going to Trash.
And now click on Delete Permenently for each page.
You can easily create a new page by clicking on Add New.
Now close the pop up that is showed. After that you can enter a title for the homepage, for this example I set this to Home and click twice on Publish to save the page.
To create the second page, click on the WordPress icon on the left on top of the screen.
Now click on Add New.
Enter the title About us and then click on Publish twice again.
Just repeat the same steps to create the third page and the title for this one is Contact. After you have done that go back to the Pages section and you can see that all three are now added in the WordPress dashboard.
Add new Posts
Now that the three pages have been created, I’m going to create the three posts in almost the same way.
To create a post you need to click on Posts in the left navigation menu. Now remove the Hello World! post by clicking on Trash.
After that go to Trash and select Delete Permanently. To create a new post, click Add New.
For this example I will name the first post Top 3 Luxury watch brands for men.
Set Post category
As you can see a post gives you more options (compared to pages) on the right menu that is displayed.
For example, you can create a new category for the post at Categories. If you have several posts that cover the same topic, you can place them into the same category. This makes it easier for visitors to navigate on your website and find the relevant information they are looking for.
If you click on the category link then all posts will be showed that belong in the same category. For example the post that you are reading now is placed in the category Website and the subcategory WordPress as you can see below the title above the page.
For the post in this tutorial I want to create the Mens watches category. To do that go to Categories and click on Add New Category. Now enter the title of the category and click on Add New Category.
Optionally you can create a subcategory by using the Parent Category field.
Set Post tags
Tags are also useful for visitors to easily navigate to relevant posts on your site.
These are even more specific than categories and subcategories.
In the post you are reading right now i have set the tag WordPress as you can see below the post title.
By clicking on a tag you can see all other posts on the website which have the same tag. You can add one or multiple tags to your posts very easy.
For this example I want to use 3 tags: top 3, luxury watches and watches for men.
You can also set this up afterwards designing the posts but I usually do this right away. Just type the tag you want for the post in the field and press Enter to add it.
Set Post featured image
Once the tags are set up now go to Featured image to add an image to your post. To add an image, click on Set Featured image.
Now drag the image that you want onto the page. For SEO purposes it’s also recommend to add an Alt Text that gives a short description relevant to the image. After that click on Set Featured Image to save all settings.
Now click twice on Publish to save the post settings and click on the WordPress icon to go back to the previous section in the dashboard.
Create the second post by following the same steps as the first one.
First click on Add New. Enter the title for the second post, in this example it is Top 3 Luxury watches for women.
For this post I create the category Women’s watches.
This post will have 3 tags: top 3, luxury watches and watches for women
Now we need to upload another image. Click Set Featured Image again and drag another image onto the page and also set the Alt. Text for this image. For this example i have set it to womens watches, and after that click on Set Features Image.
Then click Publish twice again to save the post and the settings.
Go back again by clicking on the WordPress logo and click on Add New again to create the third and final post for this tutorial.
This one will be titled The best affordable luxury watch brands you need to check out!
For category I fill in Affordable Luxury Watches. This post will only have one tag which is affordable luxury watches.
After the tag has been set, all we need to do is upload an image and fill in the Alt. Text and for this image that is Luxury watches. Click on Set Featured Images again and after that click on Publish twice to save this post and the settings.
As you can see all the three posts are now being displayed in the Posts sections.
Select the homepage (static page)
Now we can also directly set the page that we have called Home to be shown as the homepage for the website. To do this go to the navigation menu and select Settings and then select Reading.
As you can see, the option Your latest posts is set by default.
I will adjust this to the page we have just created with the title Home.
But before I do this adjustment, I first want to show you what the homepage looks like at this point when you visit the URL of the website in your browser. For this I open a new tab and now you see this page:
What we are going to do now is select which page should be shown as the homepage.
And in this case, I want to set the page titled Home as the homepage.
Therefore go to A Static Page and I select the page Home that I have just created.
Don’t forget to click on Save Changes afterwards.
If you now refresh the page in the other browser tab, you will see that the Home page is displayed because it is now set as the Static page. So now you know how to set a page as the homepage for your website.
As mentioned earlier, the design does not look good yet but we will all fix that in the next tutorials in this series!
As mentioned earlier I want to change the Site Title and to do that I go back to Settings and then click on General.
In the Site Title, I delete Top 10 and leave the title as Luxury watch brands reviews so that it fits better with the post titles that I have used in this tutorial.
Then scroll down and click on Save Changes and now that’s done!
Now it’s time to install a theme and also a couple of plugins. After that it’s time to start designing the website so you’re almost done with the technical stuff.
You can watch the video tutorial on YouTube over here.
Don’t forget to like and subscribe to the YouTube channel. I would appreciate that very much!
In the next tutorial I will explain everything about themes.