Reordering Web Pages
Page Attributes - Parent and Order (click to enlarge)
Every web page in your WordPress web site has two attributes:
- Parent
- Order
If you want a page to be nested under another page, just set the Parent to the correct page.
The Order field applies to all pages on the same level – so if a page has 5 sub pages, the Order field is used to sort the 5 pages when they appear under the parent.
Reorder Pages
If you have a lot of pages in your website, you’ll want to check out the Reorder Pages option (Dashboard, Pages, Reorder Pages).
If search engine rankings concern you, before using this option carefully read the Big, Big, Note about Changing Parents below.
This option lets you:
- Drag and drop pages to reorder
- Drag pages under other pages to nest them
If you have a menu structure that automatically displays menu items (such as Dynamic Dropdown or any menus that use the Pages widget in the sidebar), this is a super fast way to restructure your pages in your menus.
Reorder Pages
Big, Big, Note about Changing Parents. If you are changing page parents, don’t ignore search engines. If you’ve got a page at mysite.com/tours/paris/ and you lovingly tend it, the search engines will get to know it. Over time they learn to trust it and your page builds authority (page rank). If one day you move it from mysite.com/tours/paris/ to mysite.com/travels/paris, search engines will snuff out all that authority you’ve built up for the page and your /travels/paris page will start from scratch again – in the eyes of search engines. So … if your pages are indexed, you can change the order of pages without affecting search engines at all, but if you change page parents (which changes the page URL), make sure you create a page redirect to tell the search engines where it has gone. Read the article here: Redirecting your Old pages to your New pages
pageMash Plugin Credit
Note: This option comes courtesy of an excellent plugin called pageMash – the name is a bit scary so we changed it to something more intuitive, and adjusted the wording.
