How To Change the Order of Your WordPress Pages

By default your WordPress pages are displayed in alphabetical order.  Sometimes this is not what a blogger wants, here is a quick hack to change the order of your pages.

Why Change the Order of Your Pages?

You may want to change the order of your pages to make more important pages stand out, for example on my site, I want hire me to be on the right so it is more prominent or you may want to improve your sites usability by clustering like pages together.

Sometimes you just want to rebel, the OCD of developers may get you down, ordering everything and indexing and categorising can overwhelm the more free spirited.

The Out of the Box Hack

Here is how you can modify the order that your pages are displayed.

From the edit pages section, select one of your pages and you will see the following attribute box on the right of your page copy:

As you can see their is a numeric option for the page order.  By default all pages are set to zero, but if you set a value for each page you can control the order.  e.g. about =1, contact =2, testimonials =3 and this order will be displayed on your page layout.

As it says above, this is a little bit “janky” if you add new pages you will need to  modify the order again.  If you want a simple page order change this hack does exactly what it says on the tin.

Mirror Mirror on the Wall What’s the Best Page Order Process of All

You oh Dude tell everyone the out of the box hack which is fine, but lo what’s this I see, a plugin is more fair than thee.

If you are looking for something a little more polished then why not check out the My Page Order Plugin http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/my-page-order/

You Are A Free Spirit

Don’t let the “Man” tell you which order your pages should be in.  Go out make a stand and break their structured universe 🙂