New WordPress users are often confused by the difference between “pages” and “posts”. This is understandable, because the page- and post-editors look very similar. Here are some differences between them:

The posts of your site are the individual “articles” making up the blog in your site. (Remember that in ACWP, we often call your blog the “News Feed”.) The posts are displayed within the reverse-chronological structure of the blog, with the newest posts appearing on the top. By their very nature, posts are designed for dated content.

The pages of your site are outside the blog structure. On a blogging site, the pages would be very few, and be static information, like a biography of the blogger. The information on pages is not going to change much over time.

Use pages for the information about your organization that will not be changing week-to-week or month-to-month.

Use posts for date-based information and information that will become “old news” over the next few weeks.

For most of the churches and organizations that we work with, this means they are creating pages as they are setting up their website (Home page, About, Worship, etc.), and after their website launches, they mostly focus on creating posts.

There are a couple of other differences between pages and posts that might be helpful:

• Posts can have “categories” and “tags” apply to them, which can be helpful for sorting your posts, or helping users of your site to find similar posts or topics. Pages cannot have categories or tags applied to them.
• Pages can be organized in hierarchical ways. That is, using your menu, you can create sub-pages, and even sub-sub-pages. In general, faith community websites only develop this level of complexity when they are very large, and have many programs and ministries. Posts cannot be organized in a hierarchical manner.
• Posts (and not pages) are what is included in the RSS feed from your site. The RSS feed from your site can be utilized in a number of helpful ways, including making automatic Facebook posts – but utilizing this only works with posts.