Convert WordPress pages to posts

I like WordPress, but I don't like the WordPress page system at all. That's why I recently converted all my plugin pages to posts. My main reasons for doing so were:

Pages can't be tagged
Pages don't have categories
Pages and posts don't mix too well in custom loops
Pages don't appear in your RSS feed
Posts are better for usability and SEO

I converted the pages with the help of the excellent p2pConverter plugin. Converting the pages is very easy. The plugin adds a "convert to post" button to every page on the page overview. Just click it, confirm, and you're basically done. Of course, having more features for posts makes it necessary to perform a few additional steps after the conversion to get the full benefit:

The category will be your default category, you probably want to change that
The new post has no tags. The whole point of converting the pages (for me) was to add tags.
As a safeguard I added 301 redirects to my server config from the old page address to the new post. The plugin or WordPress seems to do this anyway, but I wanted to be 100% sure nothing breaks in the future. Besides, doing this in the webserver saves a few PHP calls.

One thing that isn't ideal is that all converted posts were added to the top of my RSS feed, even though their publishing date is the same as that of the former page. I'm not sure it's possible to work around this, but I don't think it's a big deal if you're only dealing with a few pages.

9 comments

Charlotte Real Estate - Terry wrote this comment on Dec. 5, 2010, 1:29 p.m.

Do you think this would apply when your blog is just a part of a much larger website? I've a thesis site that has many, many pages, and many posts. I publish both pages and posts, and nave noticed the deficiency you mention in pages...yet the permanence of pages makes me like them. Many become unnavigable within the site if you forget to link to them, still analytic s reveal large results online.
nicolas wrote this comment on Dec. 6, 2010, 9:23 p.m.

I don't use many pages on any website I build. Usually it's posts + one or many custom post types. The CPTs support categories, tags, custom taxonomies etc which makes them much more usable. I'm not sure what you mean by permanence tbh, I see no difference between posts and pages here (unless you forget to link to all pages).
raymund wrote this comment on Jan. 10, 2011, 3:34 a.m.

Will posts get more traffic than pages?
nicolas wrote this comment on Jan. 10, 2011, 4 p.m.

Not necessarily, but they are easiert to categorize for search engines if you use the tools at hand, tags and categories.
Kit Green wrote this comment on Jan. 21, 2011, 6:50 p.m.

Some plugins need a page to work - I think Fast Secure Contact Form may be one of these, and a custom login page I use.
Resorts in Nagpur wrote this comment on Feb. 21, 2011, 2:15 p.m.

I download the wordpress but i don't understand how to add the plugings. Can u explain it.
nicolas wrote this comment on Feb. 21, 2011, 7:42 p.m.

http://codex.wordpress.org/Managing_Plugins
Mooshie wrote this comment on Nov. 23, 2011, 1:53 a.m.

Hi there, I've been building websites for over 10 years, and there are definitely reasons for usings posts AND pages :-) With Wordpress.org: -- I always add Categories and Tags to my own sites and clients' website pages (via plugins which connect them to the inbuilt Categories and Tags structure) -- my pages do appear in RSS feeds -- in my years of SEO managment, pages and posts work EXACTLY the same for SEO - there is no difference whatsoever -- the only thing I've found which can lessen the impact of SEO is when the writer of the web content doesn't understand how to use all the different SEO components, and this is true whether they write pages or posts. Many folks like static websites and Pages are perfect for this. To update sites often, using a blog is the ideal way to go, so adding blog posts to static sites is great. I have sites with hundreds of pages who also have hundreds of blog posts, and there are good reasons for using both. Thanks for a great article, Cheers
Nicolas Kuttler wrote this comment on Nov. 23, 2011, 12:45 p.m.

Yeah, you can add tags + categories to pages through plugins, but I don't really like doing that. Actually, I have switched to using Django to build sites. So I don't have to deal with the artificial post/page separation wordpress does :-)

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