WordPress was designed to be a blogging platform, but it has become a user-friendly content management system for business websites, virtual stores, and much more. If you are a business owner with a WordPress based website, it may help to learn basic functions of your dashboard and posting options. The process is easier than you think. Here are some WordPress basics every site owner should know.
The Difference Between Posts And Pages
Posts and Pages are two common components of the WordPress Dashboard, and at the surface, they sound the same. They both have independent URLs and the ability to share information, but posts are set up to be somewhat temporary. In a traditional business website, a page might be something like “About Us” or “Contact Us” that doesn’t go away. A post most often refers to a blog post, though it may be used for other components of your website. For example, if you have a running list of customer testimonials on your website, each testimonial may be set up as a post. Gallery submissions are also considered posts in most WordPress templates, with the gallery itself being a page.
From an SEO perspective, pages are the cornerstones of the keywords on your website. Let’s say you run a roofing company, and you want to promote the terms “roofing contractor,” “roof repair,” and “roof inspection.” You would have an independent page devoted to each of those terms. You may then have blog posts that interlink to those pages, like “What To Look For In A Roofing Contractor” or “10 Questions To Ask Your Roofing Contractor.” Both of those would be considered posts, pointing to the page you created before.
The Purpose Of Featured Images
Featured images are set up to be introductions to posts on a website. For instance, let’s say that you have a list of services that you want to showcase on the homepage. If you only want a snippet of the description to show up on that page, you might set a featured image for each service that represents what the service is. If you have a blog on your business site, you might have a featured image that acts as a preview for each post’s content.
Some featured images will show up on the post itself without any extra work on your end, and others will simply show up on other pages referencing the post. It all depends on how your WordPress template is coded. You can easily add other images to your posts and pages through your WordPress dashboard, but the featured image acts as an introduction to the post or page in question.
