Suppose if we take a newspaper or magazine as a website then all of its articles are blog posts, advertisements are the Google Adsense, date & classified ads are the widgets where as editor’s note, table of contents and cover pages are the static WordPress pages. WordPress provides you both posts and pages you can publish from admin dashboard.
Posts are the main content of a blog, they shows up in descending order on your blogpage or frontpage and can be easily browsed with categories and tags. Posts are dated, they appear in reverse chronological order and hence when you publish new blog posts, the older posts gets automatically pushed down on their archive, category and tag pages etc.
Some business website use posts for publishing about their recent events, their news, e-commerce webstore use it for publishing updates about their new products, bloggers use it for publishing the blog posts of their niche whereas many people use posts as updates about their day or just a single photo posted on the go from their mobile phone, may be an essays or a photo collections with galleries and slideshows or whatever.
It depends on the new thing which you want to share with your visitors, how you want to use your blog and what kind of content you like to create. Using posts you can create all kinds of content, classify it with tags, categories and make others coming back to your website.
Read our tutorial on how to write and publish your first blog post.
Where as pages are the static sections of a website like you must have seen various websites with About Us & Contact Us links, these are the static pages. In WordPress static pages doesn’t mean that it is hard to edit content inside them and you need to know HTML etc. Pages can also be edited very easily, just like posts. The difference is that they are not shown in ascending or descending order and they don’t have any specific archive page which shows the list of your website pages.
Instead they are used as links mostly in website’s menus to make them always visible to visitors. Again if we take a old days paper magazine as a website then the editor’s note, table of contents and cover will be called as static pages because they are always there in all volumes.
You can also use pages in WordPress to create a completely static website. Pages are handy for timeless content, like a Get in Touch, Who We are, What We Do, Our Projects, Resume, FAQs like sections of a website.
In WordPress, you can create a page from your admin area Dashboard -> Pages -> Add New screen. It is almost same as creating a new post but in case of a page there are no tags and categories. Pages does not appear in any chronological order instead you can create them in hierarchical order. Hierarchical order means a page can have multiple child pages too and you can display them in that way in your website’s menu bar or as a sidebar widget.