Creating a New Page

Your website is mostly made up of pages, so you need to know how to create new ones! Visitors rely on your pages to learn more about your organization and all the good you’re doing. In this article, we’ll show you how to create new pages that are well thought out and customized to fit your needs.

If you’d like additional tips on building out great content, head on over to our Essential Web Page Content for Nonprofits guide.

Helpful Terminology

• The featured image is the main photo associated with the post or page. It displays as the header image at the top of a page.
• The sidebar is an area of a page that is for displaying information that is not part of the main content. The sidebar is usually a vertical column on the right side of the page.
• A page template is used to control the layout of the content and functionality on the page. For example, a page template may or may not include a sidebar area.
• A meta description is a brief summary of a webpage’s content which may be displayed in search results so users know what the page is about.
  

Where Do I Add a New Page?

There are various ways to create a new page for your website, all of which require you to be logged into your site. The following is the easiest way to create a new page once you’ve logged in:

• When you log in, you’ll be looking at your site’s Dashboard. On the left hand side,  hover over the “Pages” item and click “Add New”.

Customizing a New Page

Once you’ve added a new page, you’ll want to build it out by adding content and adjusting any page settings as needed, such as the page template it uses. Be sure and review our helpful tips for formatting page content.

• Make sure your page has a title.
  • Entering a title for a new page will create its URL slug. In some cases, you may want to adjust that to remove words like “a”, “the” or “and”, for example. To update a page’s URL, find the “Permalink” box in the right sidebar and update the “URL Slug” field.

• Add the page content into the content editor. If you are copying and pasting content from an outside source like Microsoft Word, be sure to right mouse click and select the “Paste as Plain Text” option before you paste in your content. 

• Consider using block patterns as a starting point for entering and formatting content on a new page, and check out our Formatting Text on a Page or Post article for other helpful information.
• If you want the page to have a header image, set the Featured Image. The Featured Image option can be found on the right side of the page. Click the Featured Image toggle to find the option to upload or select an image.

• Each new page uses the default template. You can change the template if you want the content to span the full-width of the page and not show a sidebar. Choose the “Full Width (no sidebar)” template on the right side of the page under the “Page Attributes” section.

• You’ll probably want your new page to live in a specific location on your site. If it should live under another page that’s already been published, set the Parent Page option. The Parent Page option can be found on the right side of the page under the Page Attributes section.
  • For example, a new page about your mission would likely have “About Us” as a parent page.

• Finally, adjust the meta description to summarize the page content. Go to the Yoast SEO section below your content and click on “Edit Snippet” to customize the snippet. If you’d like more information about meta descriptions and tips on writing them, take a look at our article about meta description best practices.

Publishing a Page

Once you’ve added your content, adjusted the meta description and selected your settings, click the blue Publish button located toward the top right corner of the screen to add the new page to your website. The page will not be live or publicly accessible until it is published.

You can also preview what your page will look like without publishing it by clicking the gray Preview button to the left of the Publish button.