WordPress 101: How to Create New Pages and Child Pages

If you’re running a WordPress site, you have the ability to create new Pages, manage those already on your site, and even organize them into “sub-pages”, known as Child Pages in WordPress. Here’s how to do it!

Firstly, login to your WordPress site.

From there, click on Pages in the left navigation menu for a list of all of the Pages on your site, from which you can choose an existing page, or click Pages > Add New if you’d like to create a new Page.

Create your Page in WordPress. I also have information on all of the available options for creating a Page in WordPress. Once you’ve created the text, etc. for your Page, you’ll want to look for the Page Attributes box, typically located about halfway down the right column of the Page editor screen.

partial screenshot showing the Page Attributes panel as described here
The Page Attributes panel as of WordPress 3.9.1

We’re focusing on that Parent dropdown box here. As I mentioned, sub-pages in WordPress are considered “Child Pages”. So naturally, in order to make a Page a Child, we need to give it a Parent. Just select the page you want this page to live beneath, and click Publish (or Update if you’re editing an existing page).

What Does it Mean to Make a Page a Child Page?

Two primary things happen when you nest a page beneath another one. Depending on your theme, a few other things can happen as well.

Firstly, when working in the Pages section of WordPress, Child Pages will appear beneath their Parent, with a hyphen placed before them to indicate this. Now we have a visual way to know which pages are held in which “sections” of our website.

partial screenshot of the Pages section of WordPress, showing child pages beneath their parent
Here we can see the hyphens denoting some pages as children of their parents. So the CSS3 & HTML5 pages, for example, are children of the Pittsburgh Web Design page.

Next, the Page’s URL (ie, the website address) will change. By default, WordPress will create a “slug” for your page based on the Page’s Title. So if you create a Page, with no parent, called My Awesome Summer Vacation, that page will live at the following URL on your site:

http://yoursite.com/my-awesome-summer-vacation

Spaces are replaced with hyphens, and special characters like apostrophes and punctuation marks are removed.

Now if you make that Page a child of your My Adventures Page, the URL will change to reflect that one page is a child of the other.

http://yoursite.com/my-adventures/my-awesome-summer-vacation

This can be useful for users who want to see how your site’s pages are organized, as well as help search engines understand how your website is structured.

Additionally, some themes are setup to show Pages on the front end by default. Some examples are:

Navigation Menus sometimes automatically add all of the Pages on your site. So if you don’t nest any pages, and you have lots of Pages, you’ll end up with odd looking navigation. See below:

screenshot of the TwentyThirteen WordPress theme with every page listed out in the navigation, causing it to stretch over three lines

If you make some pages children of others though, WordPress will automatically nest your menus to reflect that, and create dropdown menus instead of just listing everything out on as many lines as it takes.

Other themes will show the children of a particular page you’re on in the sidebar, or use child pages as “related pages” in a widget.

Now that you know how Children and Parent Pages relate to one another, and how to set them up, you’re all set to create an amazing website structure that will help your SEO and visitors understanding of your site in general!

Up Next: How to Change Font Colors, Sizes, Etc. in WordPress (and Why You Shouldn't)