As explained in our previous article, pages are intended to be used a certain way; you'll want to master the basics in the first article before moving ahead with this one.
In this article, we'll elaborate a little bit on what else you can do with Pages.
Slugs - as explained earlier, a Page will have both a Title and a Slug. A Title should be a simple, one or two word description of your page, such as Home, About, Contact Us, or Privacy Policy. WordPress allows you to also make use of a Slug, which is a way to add a little more information to your page title without actually including it in the title itself. Your Slug can be edited by clicking on the Edit button below your Title. Here, you can type whatever additional information you'd like, and your Slug will be automatically formatted the way WordPress prefers it, which will be all lowercase, and your spaces will be replaced by hyphens. You cannot add special characters to a Slug, but you can include numbers. For example, you may title your page About Us, but your slug can be learn-more-about-our-company. This is useful if you'd like to add more information for search engines to find your site.
Parent and Child Pages - A Parent page is a top-level page that is intended to be a stand-alone page, or the parent of Child Pages. This means you can add pages under a Parent Page in order to keep your site clean and streamlined:
- Top Level
- Child Page
- Child Page
- Child Page
- Child Page
- Child Page
- Child Page
- Child Page
Featured Images - you can assign a Featured Image to any Page or Post in WordPress. This will allow you to display Pages and Posts in a nice way that gives a visual, at-a-glance example of the content of the Page or Post. Featured Images are not required on Pages for most sites, so while this information is useful, it really applies more to Posts than anything.
Page Content - you can add text to your Pages and Posts, but you'll also have the option of adding images, videos, and links to documents as well. If you've ever used a Rich Text Editor to send an email, or you're familiar with software like Google Docs or Microsoft Word, you should have no trouble using the WordPress editor. A good tip for embedding videos is to paste the URL and let WordPress set the embed up for you. It's super fast and removes the hassle of grabbing the embed code from YouTube or Vimeo.
Page Builders - there are a lot of page builder plugins available these days. We tend to prefer SiteOrigins Page Builder and the Divi Builder. Both of these page builders have proven to be effective in allowing our clients to edit and revise their website content easily, using the myriad features each builder has to offer.
Order - pages can be assigned an order to be listed in both the backend under Pages, as well as in your navigation menu. By default, pages are assigned a 0 and will default to ordering themselves alphabetically in the Pages section of your Dashboard. You can use the drag and drop feature to order your pages for your navigation menu.
For more information on Pages and their features, continue with our next article.