About the WordPress “Pages” Section

Originally Posted on February 2, 2012 Last Updated on August 22, 2016

This is a post intended for clients of ClickNathan.com. While you may find the information below useful, as it generally applies to WordPress, there may be information involving customized aspects of WordPress that aren’t out-of-the-box features. It was written for WordPress v. 3.3.1.

The Pages menu gives you access to all content on your site that is considered a Page (capital “P”). This differs from the standard definition of a “web page” (lower case “p”) in general. Web pages on your site could be anything from Pages, as defined here, to search results pages, blog indexes, and single post blog pages.

Here we’ll review the basic functionality of WordPress Pages.

Pages > All Pages

This is a master list of all pages on your site. The list has various pieces of information, including:

Page Titles If you hover over a particular Page’s title, you’ll get a few additional options, allowing you to quickly edit certain aspects of a Page, Trash the page (ie, move it to a “Trash Bin” where it can be retrieved later, but won’t be shown on the front end of the site while it’s in the Trash), Edit it (see Pages > Add New below for info on editing Pages) or View the Page.
– Page Title When a “-” is present before a Page’s title, it means that it is a sub-Page of the page above it. Sub-Pages in WordPress are known as Child Pages (with relationship to their Parent Page)
Author which user created the Page.
Comments if the Page has them, though I do not usually set up comments on most Pages, and only ever do if you’ve also purchased Blogging with your project.
Date the page was published.
All | Published | Trash These links allow you to view different types of pages.
Bulk Actions By ticking off the checkboxes by a page, you can perform certain actions on multiple pages at once.
Search allows you to search for keywords. The feature will search the Page’s Title & Content, though no other aspects of the page will be searched (such as SEO or Comments)

Pages > Add New

This will cover the basic functionality available within the Page Editor. If your particular site has additional functionality, you will received it with your initial Beta How To document.

Title Field

Sets the title of the Page, displayed in the content area on the front end.

Permalink

Though not viewable initially when creating new Pages (typically until you add a Title or some content in the Content Editor), this provides some level of control over the URL of a Page.

By default, WordPress creates the URL of a page based on it’s Title. So if you had a page with a Title of “How I spent my summer vacation” the URL (referred to in WordPress at times as the Permalink), would be:

http://yourwebsite.com/how-i-spent-my-summer-vacation

By clicking the yellow highlighted area of the Permalinks section, you can modify the last piece of this to just about anything you want. Note that you can’t use spaces in URLs, WordPress will automatically replace spaces with a dash.

Content Editor

This is the big box in the middle of the page. It’s where you actually add the bulk of your Page’s content. It has multiple capabilities, including:

Upload/Insert

You can upload images and other types of files here, using the first icon (which looks like a camera with a musical note behind it). Additionally, you can add forms here if your site includes the Gravity Forms plugin. More details on the Upload/Insert functionality.

Visual / HTML

Visual mode allows you to create content in a format similar to a word processor such as Microsoft Word or Apple’s Pages program. You get a variety of buttons that allow for easy formatting including bold, italics, creating lists, aligning content, inserting links, etc. Note: You should never paste into the Content Editor while you’re in Visual mode. This will copy over all formatting from whatever you used to create the content (ie, Microsoft Word) and while you’ll retain handy info like bold and italics, you’ll also copy over the invalid HTML that the original word processing program used, and the end result will be that your site’s front end will be ugly, the content will not match the format and style of the rest of your site, and you could even break your site’s entire layout.

HTML mode provides an interface for working more closely with the code behind your posts. It is not recommended for the faint of heart, and does require some knowledge of writing HTML and CSS. Even for those who don’t want to get involved in messing with the HTML, though, this tab is highly useful for pasting in copy from another word processor (see the note above in this section) and for pasting in embed code from other sites (such as YouTube or Google Maps).

SEO

This area may contain a plethora of fields depending on your particular project. Any additional fields will be explained with your Beta How To document. There are two standard fields that I build into every site though, both of which have to do with Search Engine Optimization.

Title Tag

This populates the HTML Title Tag of a page (typically displayed in the top of a browser window). More information on Title Tags can be found here.

Meta Description

This populates the Meta Description tag of a page (typically displayed in the top of a browser window). More information on Meta Descriptions can be found here.

Facebook

This gives you similar control to the code that appears in the background of your site, telling Facebook what it should display for the image, content and title when your posts are shared on Facebook. Google+ and Twitter will typically respect these settings as well.

Discussion

This is not applicable to most of the WordPress sites I develop, as commenting is not included on Pages.

Slug

This functions similar to how the Permalink section does above, allowing you to manipulate the URL of a Page.

Author

Here you can use the dropdown to change who the Author of a page is, for administrative purposes. If your site has multiple users, particularly if they have different roles (like Admin, Author, Editor and Contributor), this can be useful.

Publish

Here you can control the aspects of how this Page will appear on the front end. There are a few options:

Save Draft & Preview Buttons

Allow you to do just what they say. Saving a Page as a Draft will not put it live to the site, but you can come back and work on it later. Preview will show you what the Page will look like on the front end, though only a logged in Administrator or Author of a Page will be able to see the preview (in other words, it doesn’t really exist on the front end).

Status

Click Edit to change this. The possible values are:

Draft The Page is not live on the front end of the site, but can be edited via the backend.
Published The Page is live on your actual website.
Pending Review Someone created the Page (either via a form on your site’s front end, if that is included in your site’s functionality) or a user you created as a Contributor. The Page is not live on the front end, and must be approved by an Editor or Admin before going live. This is not typically included functionality on most websites I create.

Visibility

Click Edit to change this. The possible values are:

Public If the Page is Published, anyone can see it on the front end.
Password protected If the Page is Published, anyone can see get to it on the front end, but they’ll need to type in the password you designate to see the actual content.
Private If the Page is Published, only logged in Administrators or the Page’s Author can see the page, though it is live on the front end, just not displayed to anyone but those types of users.

Publish Date

By default, new Pages are put live to the front end of the website as soon as you click Publish for the first time. This allows you to enter a date into the future which will prevent the Page from appearing live on the front end until that date and time.

Publish / Update Button

You must click this to save any changes you make while editing the Page.

Page Attributes

This controls various aspects of the Page itself. There are three options, but you may only see two, depending on your particular site’s setup.

Parent

This allows you to designate this Page as the Child Page of another Page. Child Pages (also sometimes referred to as sub-Pages) can be thought of as living inside of a folder owned by the Parent page. Three major things will happen when you make a Page a Child Page of another Page.

The Page will get a “-” mark before it in the Pages > All Pages list, denoting it as a Child Page of the first Page abve it without a “-” mark before it’s title.
The Page’s URL / Permalink will change to reflect the parent page. So if your page’s original permalink was http://yoursite.com/page-title and you make it a Child of another page, the URL will change to http://yoursite.com/parent-page-slug/page-title.
Any preset navigation on the front end of the site that relies on displaying pages within a certain section, or sub-Pages of a particular Parent Page, will be updated to reflect the change.

Page Template

Not always present in every project, if you see this it allows you to change how this page will be displayed on the front end. You will have received additional instructions in your Beta How To document.

Order

This is a mostly outdated function that I don’t use in most of my clients’ sites. For those who do have functionality on the front end which displays lists of Pages automatically, this will allow you to order them. You’ll be notified if this is the case. It’s best to number Pages in 10s, that way if you have three Pages, and their orders are 10 and 20 respectively, you can always add a third Page and give it an Order of 15 to put it between them. If you number them 1,2,3,4,etc. then if you wanted to insert a new Page between 1 & 2, you’d need to reorder all Pages.

Featured Image

I do not implement this on most sites for Pages. If your site does have this feature working for Pages, you’ll be notified as to how it works.

Up Next? Comments on Blog Posts
← Back to the WordPress Walk Thru

Up Next: About the WordPress Dashboard