What are custom post types and why do we use them?

There’s more than just content organisation to CPTs.

Content organisation is one thing, but CPTs go even further because you can control how they behave and what taxonomies (categories and tags) they use.

• CPTs can behave like pages, with parent/child relationships or like posts that do not have that capability.
• CPTs can be marked as not public, so whilst their content can be displayed on the site (in WordPress loops and other queries), the CPT URL is not made public (so it cannot be indexed)
• They can also have their custom taxonomies assigned to them for front-end organisation and URL structuring.
• They have templates for archive, single, and terms; a CPT with the category ‘A’ can use a completely different template from the same CPT with the category ‘B.’

This makes CPTs a game-changer for organising your content and improving your SEO by allowing you significant control over your URL structure.

CPTs for SEO.

This is one of the main reasons we use CPTs here at Toast. Your site’s URL structure is crucial for SEO, and adding custom post types gives you more control over it than trying to do everything using pages and posts alone.

The WordPress site we designed and built for The Victorian Society extensively uses custom post types to optimise the URL structure and make the content management more user-friendly and easy to manage.

Custom post types can also be queried.

Again, you can run a query to show you 10 posts that are categorised as ‘Team Members’; but what are Team Members doing in your posts section?

Break them out as a CPT, and everything becomes easier to organise on the front and back end.

Having each member of your team as a separate post in a Team section means that the content can be pulled into any other page via a Gutenberg block.

Content fields can be managed.

This is another important factor for CPTs; the fields on the page you are editing can be themselves edited.

Let’s take the team example above. Each team member needs a headshot, name, job title, bio, and LinkedIn link.

With a CPT, you can make these the only fields available when adding or editing content, making content management 100% intuitive and easy to use.

The better you organise your content, the better it will rank.

CPTs make this simple truth possible in WordPress, which is why we use them on almost every site we build at Toast.

In fact, on every new site we develop, we spend a lot of time discussing the organisation of content on the front end for SEO and the ease of content management on the back end for your team.

We build WordPress sites properly, so anyone telling you that you don’t need to bother with custom post types either does not know what they are doing or simply does not know how to do it.