Plugins to Improve Your WordPress Pages

Most of us are probably used to using Posts as the basis for most of our WordPress content. And that’s fine. But if you ask me, Pages rock.

Although WordPress began life in 2003, static pages weren’t added to the software until version 1.5 AKA Strayhorn, back in 2005. Since then the range of uses for WordPress has grown, and now it’s not uncommon to find websites that are powered by WordPress where static pages take center stage and the blog is a mere appendage, if present at all.

While WordPress provides a solid foundation for you to create pages for your site, there are many fantastic plugins to help you build on the functionality of what’s available.

And so, in celebration of Pages, today we’re going to take a look at different Page related plugins that will hopefully spur some ideas and get you thinking about the creative possibilities Pages offer:

Page List
Insert Pages
Custom Sidebars
Simple Page Ordering
Post Type Switcher
No Page Comments
Feature a Page Widget
Search & Index Page Content
Post Tags and Categories for Pages
Page Management Dropdown

Page List

Page List

With just a shortcode, the Page-list plugin lets you generate a list of all your pages, a hierarchical tree of all subpages of the current page, a tree of sibling pages to the current page, and a list of pages with featured images and excerpts.

You can also apply additional parameters to pull in the exact pages you want while excluding others, and a lot more. (Tons of parameters to apply with this plugin.)

More details: Page List

Insert Pages

Insert Pages

The Insert Pages plugin lets you embed content from other Pages (or Posts) into your current Page (or Post).

You can choose to insert everything from the Page or Post (including custom field info), or you can choose to insert just the title, just the content, or just a link.

Probably the nicest thing about this is that when you change the content on the original page, it will change everywhere it’s been inserted too. This obviously opens up a lot of possibilities.

More details: Insert Pages

Custom Sidebars

Custom Sidebars

The Custom Sidebars plugin is free. And it does what you might think from its name – it lets you create and apply custom sidebars to individual Pages.

This plugin actually works for Posts too, but as most people would have more reason to change up their Page sidebars than their Posts sidebars, it seems like a good plugin to include here.

More details: Custom Sidebars

Simple Page Ordering

Simple Page Ordering

Page ordering is one of the features of the aforementioned Advanced Page Manager (APM) plugin. However, if you’d like an easy way to change the order of your pages without all the other features of APM, then this plugin could be for you.

After activating this free plugin on your site, you can now change the order of your pages simply by dragging and dropping them into place. Visually this plugin doesn’t make any changes to the admin interface of your site. However, when you move your mouse cursor over an item on the page manager screen, you can now drag and drop it into a new position.

Altering the order of pages on the management screen changes their order in menus and widgets. This makes using Simple Page Ordering an easy way to ensure that your pages are in the correct order when they are listed on the front end of your website.

More details: Simple Page Ordering

Post Type Switcher

Post Type Switcher

This free plugin gives you the ability to change posts to pages, as well as a few other conversion options.

If you’ve ever started writing what should be a page in the post editor, or had a change of heart after publishing a page that would’ve been better off as a post, then the Post Type Switcher plugin can save you a lot of effort.

With this free plugin running on your website, you will now be able to change the post type of any piece of content you are working on. Making the switch is simply a case of using the drop down menu that the Post Type Switcher plugin adds to the Publish panel on the editor screen. It really is that easy.

This plugin works at the individual page or post level, so if you need to bulk convert items then the Convert Post Types plugin is a better choice as it can convert many posts or pages at the same time.

More details: Post Type Switcher

No Page Comments

No Page Comments

Of course, WordPress gives you the ability to turn comments on or off for all Posts and Pages.

And it also gives you the ability to manually turn comments on or off for individual Posts or Pages.

However, it doesn’t have a setting for how most people would usually like their comments set up, which is on for Posts but off for Pages.

This plugin solves that problem.

More details: No Page Comments

Feature a Page Widget

Feature a Page Widget

The Feature a Page Widget is simple and convenient. Just put a featured image and an excerpt into a page, and then you can feature that page in your sidebar with the widget from this plugin.

One nice aspect about the widget is that it comes with three different designs.

Note: We tested this plugin with WordPress 5.9 (April 2022) and found that while it works fine with the Classic widgets screen (using the Classic widgets plugin), the widget did not display a page selector dropdown menu when using Block widgets.

More details: Feature a Page Widget

Search & Index Page Content

Search & Index Page Content

The Search & Index plugin is built for especially long pages. It automatically creates a kind of table of contents for a page with links for any headings (H1, H2, H3) you might have in a document.

The plug comes with a widget that you place in your sidebar, but that widget only appears on pages marked up with the Search & Index shortcodes.

You can also activate a search box that only searches that page the visitor is on.

Is seems to me that this plugin might work well with the Fixed Widget (Sticky Widget) plugin we went over a while ago. If you have a very long document, it might be nice if that table of contents could follow you down the page.

More details: Search & Index Page Content

Post Tags and Categories for Pages

Post Tags and Categories for Pages

Categories and tags are an integral part of WordPress that makes it easier for your readers to find more of your related content. However, by default WordPress pages can’t make use of this feature.

By activating the free Post Tags and Categories for Pages plugin you can now organize your pages in the same way as you can your posts. Your posts and pages will now share the same categories and tags. This is opposed to the plugin creating a new custom taxonomy specifically for pages.

If this sounds like something you could make use of on your website, this plugin makes this feature very easy to implement.

More details: Post Tags and Categories for Pages

Page Management Dropdown

Page Management Dropdown

If you’d like an easier way to access your pages and view the relationships between then, then the free Page Management Dropdown plugin could be just what you are looking for.

This simple but effective plugin displays the pages on your site under the top level Pages menu on the admin sidebar. Now you can jump straight to any of the individual pages on your site for editing, directly from the admin sidebar menu. This saves you the effort of sifting through the items listed on the page manager screen.

Warning: If you have lots of pages, activating this plugin can create a very long menu.

And it just keeps going forever…

While this plugin won’t change your life, it should save you some time without drastically transforming the WordPress admin interface.

More details: Page Management Dropdown

Pages Galore

If you’d like to improve the way WordPress lets you work with pages, such as enhancing the page manager, adding categories to pages, creating custom layouts, or upgrading the page display widget, hopefully our list of WordPress page-related plugins above have given you a few new ideas.

Editor’s Note: This post has been updated for accuracy and relevancy. All plugins listed above were tested (WordPress 5.9) during this update. [Originally Published: March 2014 / Revised: April 2022]

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