When it comes to websites pages, posts, & SEO, there is a lot to learn. Hopefully, you haven’t been overwhelmed with all the jargon and technicalities. Today I’m going to try and help answer one of the many questions related to pages & posts.

Which is better for SEO pages or posts? Pages are generally better than posts for SEO as you have more control over them. Platforms like WordPress and the website themes or templates you use may limit your ability to edit ‘posts’ despite them technically being considered ‘pages’ by search engines like Google.

Some of the limits of posts with SEO include:

Design
Inability to be used as child and parent pages
Default Timestamps

As a professional web designer, I will be going over all the ways in which a page is better for a post in regards to SEO. I will cover the differences between a page and a post and when to use each as I’ve learned from my years of experience so keep reading to learn more!

Is a Page or Post Better for SEO?

A page is generally better for SEO. That’s not to say a post is never better for SEO though. If you set up your posts with search optimized categories and update them regularly they may be better for you. However, for someone putting in that amount of work, pages will give you some additional benefits that will improve SEO even more.

Google and other search engines view all ‘posts’ and pages as pages just the same. The differentiation and title of ‘post’ really only carry meaning on the back end of the website builder. WordPress is one example of a website Builder that does this however there are others like Wix & Shopify.

These platforms are where you exhibit the differences that could negatively affect your SEO. From my personal experience, I know for example that certain themes on WordPress will have a page builder that has all the fancy elements you can use to design your pages. But when you create a post on that website with that theme active you’ll see the regular editor without any of the fancy features on your pages.

Loss of ability to design is a HUGE loss to any website that can significantly affect your SEO among other things. Especially with Google continually making updates that emphasize user experience. Things like mobile responsiveness, usability, images, user-friendly layouts, site architecture, etc. all depend on design to make a good user experience.

If you need professional help with web design on your WordPress pages or posts, contact me by clicking the button below:

Site architecture and hierarchy both contribute to SEO. On WordPress, these are handled differently for posts than they are for pages.

If you use regular pages in addition to posts on your website without consciously planning it you can hurt your SEO. This happens because your site ends up having two different hierarchies with parent pages and categories that potentially could be related and fall under the same topics but are separated.

Should I Use Posts or Pages in WordPress?

You should technically use pages in WordPress for the best results online. Pages on WordPress use page builders and parent pages which gives them a lot more features than posts.

I constantly use some of the most popular themes on WordPress including Avada and BeTheme. Both of these do not have any of their page builders available in the post editor. Wix Posts suffer from the same problem.

With 42% of the web being built on WordPress and 200 million users on Wix, the limitations of both these platforms ‘posts’ make it so that ‘pages’ are unequivocally the better choice for website SEO.

Page builders on WordPress afford you opportunities in design that will directly affect user experience and can improve your conversions anywhere from 1% to 1000%, there is technically no limit to how much you can improve by continually optimizing through design.

A simple example could be a page’s ability to display a social media feed with a page builder. A post normally can’t do that and so you miss out on a huge opportunity to cross-promote your own content.

A more complex example of this is being able to design different pages for mobile and desktop users. With screen sizes between these two users being incredibly different it’s important you optimize the experience for both of them. WordPress Themes with page builders can allow you to design separate pages for these users. A post can’t do that. This type of control can make a difference of night and day for an online business.

As WordPress improves the post editor the gap between pages and Posts may begin to close. However with the endless amount of third-party themes competition in the market drives them to improve a lot faster than WordPress can and so until more of these themes include improvements to the post editor as part of their theme, pages will continue to be better.

Posts use ‘categories’ and ‘tags’. ‘Categories’ and ‘tags’ tell Google that pages are related via links through a category page. ‘Author’ and ‘archive’ pages on WordPress do the same thing linking posts together.

If you don’t actively maintain these category and author pages to ensure that content in them is relevant it may confuse Google negatively affecting your SEO.

How Do Posts Work on WordPress? What Are They?

Post on WordPress our pages that by default on the built-in WordPress themes display on your homepage and/or blog page. By default, they also can be commented on and are included in your site’s RSS feed.

To write a post you

1) Login to your WordPress Administration Screen
2) Click on the post tab
3) Click the “Add new” button

This will take you to a brand new post page where you can create a post using ‘blocks’ using the WordPress Gutenberg Editor. You can add paragraphs, images, video, headings, tables, lists, code, and more. Using the sidebar you will be able to view revisions, select a category, add tags, add featured images, change the link for the post, publish it, and more.

In a nutshell that explains posts.

What Is the Difference Between a Post, a Page, and a Category?

On WordPress, posts and pages are both pieces of individual content that are technically both web pages whereas a category is used to group multiple posts together. Posts are created using the Gutenberg & Classic post editor and can be attached to categories and tags. Pages can be created using page builders. Pages don’t use categories and tags but can be child and parent pages of other pages. Finally, categories can have their own pages that contain all the posts in them.

I’ve covered posts and pages in much detail already throughout the article.

Categories group multiple posts together on your website. This can be done by choosing or adding a new category in the sidebar when you create or edit a post. In the WordPress Admin Dashboard, you can find the Categories page on the left sidebar. Here you’ll find a list with all the categories on your website where you can create more, edit existing ones, or remove them if necessary.

Using a fitness & nutrition website as an example, you might want a page for each of your products on which you place descriptive information about the product as well as a detailed ‘about’ section.

These static product pages would be separate from blog posts where you review the product, go over product updates, compare it to competitors or alternatives, etc.

But all those posts could fall under the same category of whatever type of products they are. So you could have categories like protein powders, pre-workout powders, snacks, supplements, protein bars. Categories

When Would You Use a Post Instead of a Page WordPress?

WordPress posts should be used for content like blogs and news. Posts should have ‘category, author, and archive’ pages that are actively maintained. Content that is actively updated can do better as a post because posts have public timestamps that will increase click-through rate. Posts should also be used for content that you would like to use in an RSS feed.

Posts can provide an easy way to speed up and avoid having to manually do some site structure and internal linking work you would have to do when using pages. Post automatically use and generate internal links for themselves with category, author, and archive pages. This all only works if you create category pages that make sense and organize all your blogs and news content using them.

Internal linking work helps Google map out your site and determine related topics that will help your SEO for your website as a whole. This saves you a ton of time and provides a better user experience with a more organized site.

If you update these posts regularly, WordPress will automatically time stamp every time you publish them. in Google’s algorithm, these posts get a boost from the search engine on Google search results simply for being more recent especially for time-sensitive content.

Articles with more recent dates also have been proven to get more clicks on Google search result pages. This makes sense if you think about it because when you are looking at results for your own searches you usually will click on the more recent ones simply because you know it will be more relative at the present.

Posts are also automatically published to a feed or RSS in WordPress. This can be a great benefit to user experience on your website. Users can use your favorite apps or feed readers to keep up with your blog as they like.

Feeds can be subscribed to and make it easier for people to stay tuned with your content and engage with it. More easy engagement means better results for your pages online.

RSS feeds also strip down posts to plain text making them much easier to load on slower internet connections. This opens your content to a much wider audience resulting in more engagement which again means better results for you.

When Would You Use a Page Instead of a Post WordPress?

You would use a page on WordPress instead of a post whenever you want to design a more complex page that can perform better than a post. A page should also be used if you want to have full control of the hierarchy and site structure.

WordPress utilizes themes that often have page builders. These are called page builders because they only apply to pages and not posts. They are meant to bolster and improve WordPress website page designs.

Page builders make designing a page more intuitive with easy-to-use drag and drop builders. Some themes even have full demo pages you’re able to customize with the builder to your liking for your website.

Page builders also have popular elements for web design like buttons, image carousels, social media feeds, countdown timers, forms, sliders, icons, etc. All of these can be used to enhance any and all content on your website.

A lot of these page builders allow you to save your pages as reusable templates as well. This along with pre-built elements and demo pages saves you tons of time and gives you much better results than a post could.

The only way you could have all of these elements in a post would be through manually having to code them in yourself. Unless this is done by an expert this will most likely not be achievable for most website owners.

Depending on the theme you may be able to use shortcodes in your post editor. But these can slow down the page damaging the user experience. Shortcodes are also a lot harder to use as you have to input them in the raw code so you can’t visually see what you’re doing as you do it. It will take you a lot longer to design things as you have to go back and forth between preview mode and editor.

Shortcodes are also technically limited to the pre-built elements in the theme. So you won’t be able to customize them to your needs as you would be able to in a page builder on a page in WordPress.