For creating membership content, where you may be dripping the content over time, content that you may be selling as parts of different “products” or “memberships” (like for eg. content that you want to be available to your Gold and Platinum members, but not Silver members) and for almost all general purposes, create your content as WordPress “Pages”.
On the flip side, if you wish to create a typical “blog”, where people can see a reverse-chronological list of posts from you on one page, if you don’t want to think about organizing the content and want your latest post to just show up prominently on your web site’s front page, or you wish to organize content by various categories, or you wish to syndicate your content via an “RSS Feed”, then for all that, WordPress “Posts” are your best option.
Use “Pages”
- Creating member pages, courses, modules
- You will be dripping content now or in the future
- Content that is going to be part of multiple “products” or “membership levels”
- Squeeze pages, Sales pages, Landing pages
Use “Posts”
- If you wish to create a typical “blog” where you want to show a reverse-chronological (latest one first) set of content
- You don’t want to think too much about organizing the content
- You want your latest piece of writing to just show up on your front page where everyone can see it the moment you publish it
- You wish to syndicate content via an “RSS Feed” (your default feed link usually is http://YourSite.com/feed/ or http://YourSite.com/blog/feed/ )
- You want to organize content by various categories (see all of the categories here on my blog in the sidebar to your right)
- You will eventually be publishing hundreds or thousands of pages of content and will need to protect them all using a membership plugin. So you’ll need to protect content by category. So your content needs to be published as “Posts” because only posts can be categorized in WordPress, and not “Pages”.
It’s kind of hard and messy to switch and redo your content at a later point from pages to posts, and vice-versa. So make sure you give it a little bit of thought before choosing either format.
You can also publish your membership content as Pages, and also have a publicly available free “blog”, where you create your public content as Posts.
When In Doubt…
If you’re not sure, or if you don’t wish to even think about which one to pick, then just go with “Pages”.