User guide — all chapters
Pages are for the things that aren’t news
The Pages tab holds the fixed parts of a site: About, Contact, Now, Colophon. A page is written in the same composer as a post, with the same formatting and the same handling of photos.
Two differences, both of them the point:
- A page has no category and no tags. It isn’t part of the stream, so it isn’t filed like it.
- Pages are left out of your feeds, and published under
/pages/rather than/posts/. Nobody wants your About page turning up in their reader twice a year.
Pages are Draft or Published like posts, so you can write one without it going live.
Start from a template
A new, empty page offers a row of starting points: About, Now, Uses, Contact, Blogroll and Colophon. Tap one and the page gets a title and a few lines to rewrite. Contact uses your reply address if you have set one in Readers & Links, and Colophon names your theme and where the site is published.
The menu
Links to your pages sit under the site’s title on every page: posts, archives and the “Page not found” page too, so a post is never a dead end.
Until you change it, the menu is every published page, A to Z. To arrange it, open Site Settings → Menu.
| You can | How |
|---|---|
| Put links in any order | The up and down arrows on each row. |
| Hide a page from the menu | The eye button. A hidden page is still published. It just isn’t in the menu. |
| Link somewhere else | Add a link, with a title and an address: a web address, a mailto: address, or a path on your site such as /shop. |
| Add an archive, search or a Subscribe page | The three buttons below, each explained next. |
A page you publish later is added at the end.
An archive page
Add the archive gives your site a page of every post, under its year and month, in your site’s language. It is linked from the menu wherever you put it, and it exists for as long as it is in the menu.
Search
Add Search… gives your site a search page that finds posts and pages as readers type, accents and capitals aside.
Search is the only script Selfish ever adds to a site, so it is off until you add it, and the app says so before it does. The script runs on the search page alone, reads only an index of your own site, and loads nothing from anywhere else. The privacy report on the publish screen names it. Remove search from the menu and every page is script-free again.
Drafts and unlisted posts are never in the search index.
A Subscribe page
Add Subscribe adds a page, in your site’s language and theme, that tells readers how to follow you: your feed’s address to copy into a reader, Subscribe by email if you have set it up, a feed for each category and tag if you publish them, and your podcast’s address if you have one. Readers, feeds and links covers each of those.
What the home page shows
All of this is in Site Settings → Site → Home & Archives.
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Home page | Your newest posts, or one of your published pages. Choose a page and it is the first thing visitors see. Your posts move to a Blog page, which goes first in your menu. |
| Show | Excerpts (each post’s opening lines, or its own excerpt, and “Read more”), Titles only, or Whole posts, each shown down to its read-more break if it has one. |
| Posts per page | All on one page, or 5, 10, 20 or 50 to a page. Older posts continue on page 2, page 3 and so on, with newer and older links in your theme’s style. New sites start at 10. |
| A feed for each category and tag | Gives every category and tag page its own feed. See Readers, feeds and links. |
| Above your posts | Nothing, or one of your published pages. The page leads your home page, above the newest posts: a hello, a now, a photo. It keeps its own address too. |
The same Show and Posts per page settings apply to every category and tag page.
Page not found
Every site gets a “Page not found” page in your theme and language. Netlify, Cloudflare Pages and GitHub Pages show it on their own when a reader follows a bad link. On your own server or on S3, point the server’s error page at 404.html.