How to Keep WordPress Organised Using Sort Order

How to Keep WordPress Organised Using Sort Order

Keeping WordPress organised and tidy is a little bit of an obsession. In this post, I’m going to explain the benefits and how using the functionality already in WordPress can help keep your admin organised.

When setting off with your new shiny website, you might only have ten pages. As time progresses more pages get added, and after a while, you end up with something that resembles a birds nest.

The admin should reflect the front end of your website, and by this, I mean hierarchical order.

The reason for this is that you’ll be able to see if anything untoward is going on. You won’t feel dread when logging into the admin looking for a page you need to edit or change. It’s more straightforward to understand the hierarchy of the website which in turn helps with understanding and managing your SEO.

It’s really simple to do and there is no plugin required, depending on the number of pages should only take 15 minutes.

WordPress Sort Order

Sort order is available by default in WordPress pages. It can also be used in custom post types providing it’s been declared using the register_post_type function.

In this example, I’m going to use the Gutenberg editor version as this latest build.

When opening a page you need to make sure that you have block setting enabled. Block settings are displayed on the right-hand side and when collapsed will look something like the following.

Block Settings Gutenberg

In the bottom menu under ‘Page Attributes’ you can see three options. In this post, we are only going to be dealing with the ‘Order’ fields. This field takes a numerical value and once the page is updated this will then become the sort order of the pages in the admin.

When arranging pages, I find the best way is to work in increments of 10, e.g. 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 etc. The reason for this is that if you ever need to add a page between 10 & 20 you can use the value 15 without having to start again. With pages which I want to keep out of the way like T&C’s and Privacy Policies, I’ll order them as 1000 & 1010.

To speed up the process if you have a lot of pages you can use the ‘quick edit’ feature on the ‘All Pages’ tab.