WordPress Pages vs Posts: A Beginner's Guide to Pages
A quick beginner's guide to WordPress pages — how to create them, how they differ from posts, and how themes and page builders control their appearance.
What Are WordPress Pages (And How Are They Different From Posts)?
If you're just getting started with WordPress, one of the first things you'll need to understand is the difference between pages and posts. They might look similar on the surface, but they serve very different purposes.
Pages are designed for static, evergreen content — things like your About page, Contact page, or Services page. Unlike posts, pages don't display a publication date and they won't automatically appear in your site's navigation bar. They exist outside of your blog's chronological feed, which makes them perfect for content that doesn't change often.
Posts, on the other hand, are time-stamped and typically used for blog articles, news updates, or any content that's part of an ongoing stream. WordPress treats them differently behind the scenes, and they show up in your blog feed by default.
How to Create a New Page in WordPress
Creating a new page in WordPress is straightforward. From your WordPress dashboard, head to the sidebar and click on Pages, then select Add New. You'll be dropped into the block editor where you can add a page title at the top.
From there, you can start building out your content using the block editor (also known as Gutenberg). Add headlines, body text, images, or even embed videos directly into the page. Each content element is its own "block" that you can move around and customize.
Once you're happy with the content, hit the Publish button in the top-right corner. WordPress will make the page live and give you a direct link to view it on your site. The content will appear between your site's header and footer — the standard layout for any WordPress page.
Why Does Your Page Look So Plain?
Here's where a lot of beginners get tripped up. You create your first page, hit publish, and then wonder why it looks so... basic. The fonts are generic, the spacing feels off, and it looks nothing like the polished websites you've seen online.
The reason comes down to one thing: your WordPress theme. Every WordPress site has a theme installed — even if you didn't choose one yourself. Out of the box, WordPress ships with a default theme that controls the fonts, colors, spacing, padding, margins, and overall layout of your content.
Free themes tend to offer limited customization options, while premium (paid) themes give you far more control over how everything looks. The good news is that you're not stuck with the defaults — there are thousands of themes available, and you can swap them out or customize them to match your brand.
Themes vs Page Builders: Two Ways to Style Your Pages
Beyond themes, there's another popular approach to designing WordPress pages: page builders. A page builder is a plugin you install into WordPress that essentially overrides your theme's default styling and gives you a drag-and-drop, what-you-see-is-what-you-get editing experience.
Some of the most well-known page builders include Divi, Thrive Architect, Beaver Builder, and Elementor. Each has its own strengths, but Elementor stands out for a couple of reasons — it has a very capable free version and it's been installed on over 4 million websites, making it arguably the most popular page builder available.
Elementor is also Dave's personal page builder of choice when developing client websites, and it's the one covered throughout this WordPress Made Easy series. If you're looking for complete control over how your pages look without needing to write code, a page builder is the way to go.
Watch the Full Video
Prefer watching to reading? Check out the full video on YouTube for a complete walkthrough with live demos and commentary.
