The difference between pages and posts

TLDR;

• Posts are landing pages, communication with your audience about the things they are looking for in search results.
• Pages provide context to your audience, and show up as links in a menu.

WordPress is a content management system that supports pages, posts and comments out of the box. Your audience lands on posts from search results and scans your menu for pages if they are looking for more information. For instance most websites provide an audience with an about us page that tells about the big idea being communicated. Most websites also have a contact page that gives a way for the audience to communicate back with the authors.

Category pages are a way to communicate the themes of a group of posts that shows up as a menu item. Category pages need to have their own unique content that describes the theme in a way that could also show up in search results for a more general query.

Behind the scenes, pages and posts are stored in the wp_posts table, with the post_type column describing whether it is a page or a post. This makes sense as there will be mostly posts that build an audience from content they can’t find anywhere else. There will only be a few pages that fit in the space for the menu.

WordPress is a content management system. The posts are the content that your audience can’t find elsewhere. The pages are context for that content.