What is the difference between Posts, Pages and Categories?
· 2 mins readBefore creating content on your blog it’s very important to understand what sort of content goes where.
Posts
If you are a blogger, most of your sites content will be under Posts. Posts are dated and by default the latest posts show up on your homepage for most Wordpress themes.
If you’ve set your homepage to be a Static page under Settings > Reading your Homepage will display that static page and you can create another blank page and select that as the place to display the all the latest Blog Posts.
Categories
Posts can be assigned to one or multiple Categories. You can add these Categories to your Menu, so that when someone clicks on that Category in your menu they will see all the posts assigned to that Category.
When you edit a post you can assign categories to it via the right sidebar, under the Document tab. If you don’t see the right sidebar while editing posts you can click the gear icon on top of the screen. You can also view and edit your post categories under Posts > Categories in the Wordpress menu.
Tags
Tags are similar to Categories. You can assign tags to your posts and in most themes these tags will be shown when you view the post and allow you to click on them to see all the other posts with that tag. You can also show a “tag cloud” in your sidebar to help visitors navigate your website by post tag.
Just like categories tags are assigned to a post while you edit the post in the eight sidebar under the document tab and you can also view and edit your tags via Posts > Tags.
Pages
Pages are static “one off” pieces of content, like for example the About page, Contact page, Privacy policy and Disclaimer pages. Pages can be added to the Menu as well. Unlike Posts, you usually can’t assign Categories and Tags to Pages.
Common problems
A common mistake is to make a static page and call that page “home” while actually the homepage is set to display the latest posts, and then add this static “home” page to the menu as home button. Now the “home” button in the menu goes to /home (the static page) instead of the actual homepage. Probably that “home” page should actually be named “about us”.
Another common mistake is creating a static page with the same name as one of the post categories and adding that static page to the menu instead of the post category
Showing Posts on a Page
Normally you don’t want to show posts within a page, instead you should assign your posts to a category and add the category to the menu. If for some reason you really want to use a static page and also want to include some posts somewhere within that static content of the page, you can use a plugin like https://wordpress.org/plugins/posts-in-page/ to display posts of a certain category or with a certain ID somewhere within a page.