WordPress Page: Add, Edit, Delete, Publish, & Manage Page in WordPress

Introduction to WordPress Page: 

While many of us think that adding a new page in WordPress is quite simple, many beginners find the interface a little overwhelming.

The new page screen also contains some options that sometimes even bring surprises to the experienced users. In this beginner’s guide, we will explain you every feature that is available on the WordPress “add new page” screen so that you can make full use of them.

What is a Page in WordPress?  

Generally, pages are very similar to posts as both have titles and content but they have several key distinctions that make them different from posts. See our guide on posts vs pages in WordPress.

Some important characteristics of pages are:

• Pages are originally developed for contents that are not specifically time-dependent, or that are not "blog content".
• Pages can be organized into pages and subpages but can't be assigned to any categories.
• Pages can use different Page Templates, including template files, Template Tags and other PHP code.
• More advanced themes may provide wide range of adjustment options for individual pages.
• You can develop a whole website using WordPress which only contains pages.

Some common usage of pages is for creating: about page, contact page, privacy policy page etc.

How to Create a New Page:  

To create or write a new page, you must first go to Pages ⇒ Add New option [Shown Below]. It will take you to the page editor screen.

Here you can simply write the page title, a summary of your page and then click on the publish button to publish your page. Congrats! You have published your first WordPress page.

But wait… WordPress has lots of additional features to customize a page and make it user and SEO friendly.

[See Also: How to create and manage WordPress Post]

Explaining The Main Page Editor: 

The main page editor screen has several areas to write and do formatting of your page content. The most used areas are the title and page content box. See the image below where we have identified all the areas of a visual editor, followed by brief explanation about them:

Depending on whether your settings default to the visual or the text editor, the first look of the editor screen.

You can quickly switch between the visual and text editor while writing a page, it's not recommended as this could mess up your page’s visual formatting.

The WordPress Visual Editor is a beginner friendly WYSIWYG editor with essential formatting buttons and a decent visual layout for the content area. And, the text editor is a very basic plain text editor where you can see the HTML coding for your page or write your own code. You can also further extend the functionality of the visual editor by installing the TinyMCE advanced plugin.

The topmost test area is where you add the page’s title. After entering the page title WordPress will auto-generate a page URL based on the title and the permalink structure you have defined. You can also edit the URL by clicking on the edit button if you want to. See our guide on How to Configuring WordPress Permalinks settings.

The page content area is the place where you will write the content of your page. You can use the formatting options available in the toolbar or use keyboard shortcuts to speed up your writing process. See our guide on 60+ Most Helpful and Time-Saving WordPress Keyboard Shortcuts

On the left side of the footer area of the page content editor, WordPress will display the total word count for your page. On the same footer area, on the right side, it will display you the autosave status.

As you start writing content, WordPress will automatically save drafts of your page as revisions. WordPress saves drafts periodically when you continue writing more content. This autosave process ascertains that you don’t lose your content even if there is a loss of internet connection or hardware failure.

Adding Media and Images to Your Page: 

Between the page title and page content field, there is a button named "Add Media". If you want to upload any media (image/audio/video etc) to your WordPress page then you need to click on this button. This will launch the media uploader window as a hover window.

Just click on the select files button to browse local computer and upload media. Alternatively, you can drag and drop media files to that same window for uploading that to WordPress site.

WordPress also has some basic image editing capabilities like flip, rotate, and crop images to help customize the media.

Moreover, you can customize the default behavior of the uploaded media from the WordPress Media Settings screen.

Explaining Page Publishing Options: 

By default, the WordPress page edit screen is segregated into two columns. On the right side column, you will see different meta boxes to configure page settings.

The topmost meta box of the right column is dedicated to settings related to publishing and drafting pages. See the below image:

1. Clicking on the "Save Draft" button, stores a draft of the page that you are editing.

2. The Preview button us used to see a live preview of your page you are writing. You can use it to get an idea of how your page will look like after publishing.

3. The "Status" option allows you to set a status for your page. WordPress automatically takes care of the page status for all the drafts and published pages. But sometimes if you need to change any wrongly published pages to draft, you may use it manually.

4. To view and edit the visibility option, you first have to click on the Edit link next to it. The first radio under visibility setting will allow you to publish your page as publically visible.

5. The second radio button provides you the option to password protect a page in WordPress.

6. The third radio button which is labeled as "private" is used to privately publish a page on your WordPress site. This option will publish the page but the page will be only visible to the users having a minimum of editing privileges on your site.

7. Clicking on the edit link next to the Publish option will display the time and date options to schedule a page for future publication. You can use this option to schedule a future publication date or may create a backdated page in WordPress.

8. Move to Trash option allows you to delete a WordPress page. Deleted pages are stored under trash for 30 days and you can restore them if you need within that time period.

9. Finally, the Publish button allows you to publish the WordPress page according to the options selected earlier. For example, if you have selected a schedule date and time then the page will appear on your site on that selected date and time.

Adding or Assigning Parent Page and Page Order: 

The next meta box in the right-hand column is page attributes. It generally appears just below the publish meta box.

Page attribute section has two options. One is to assign a parent page to the current page, and second is to assign an order number for the page you are creating.

The “parent” option is used to define a hierarchy for the page you are creating. This is used for specific cases if you want to group pages. For example, you have a travel blog and you want dedicated pages based on the location. So, you can arrange those pages like:

India

• Kolkata
• Delhi
• Mumbai

Europe

• Great Britain
• Germany
• Italy
• France

The order attribute is used if you want to explicitly define the appearance order (sorted order) for those sub-pages, which by default sorted in alphabetical order.

Explaining Featured Image (Page Thumbnails): 

Most of the WordPress themes support featured image or page thumbnail. The page featured images are only used to show thumbnails in case you implement page carousel. Normally, it is the last box in the right-hand column of WordPress page edit screen.

Simply click on the "set featured image" link, and it will show the media uploader popup [discussed earlier]. You can then select an existing image from WordPress gallery or can upload a fresh image from your computer.

Screen Options in WordPress Page Editing Screen: 

Till now you have learned about different page publication options that are available by default. Now you will learn some options that are usually hidden by default to present a simpler and cleaner user interface. These options are not usually used by beginners. However, learning them will enhance your page creation experience.

To enable those options, just click on the Screen Options button on the top right corner of the page screen. This will bring up a menu with checkboxes and their respective option names. [Shown below]

Here, you will see that some of those options will already be checked [enabled]. You can show/hide all the available options by clicking on the respective checkbox, and it will appear/disappear on your page edit screen based on your action.

Let’s have a look at some of these options that are most useful for beginners or even for intermediates.

Discussion: 

Although comments are very useful to engage your audience, sometimes you may not prefer to have comments on a particular page or a page.

Enabling the discussion option will add a meta box below the page editor using which you can turn on/off comments and pingbacks for your page.

You can also specify global settings on WordPress Discussion Settings Screen.

Slug: 

We already know what a slug is. It is the URL of your page or page.

http://yoursite.com/this-is-the-page-slug

We already learned that WordPress automatically generates a page slug based on page title and displays it as the page URL just below the page title.

Though you can easily edit the page slug by clicking on the edit link below the page title, you can also do that same by enabling the slug option from the Screen Options.

Author: 

Usually, WordPress automatically assigns the creator of a page as the author. However, in case you want to show a different name other than the original creator of a page then you can enable the author meta box to select different author name.