A tree, not a list

Every page has a parent, except the home page at the top. The tree does two jobs at once: it builds each page's address, and it gives breadcrumbs and section listings something to follow.

A page with the slug pricing under a page with the slug services answers at /services/pricing. Move it under another parent and its address changes with it, and so does the address of every page beneath it.

Slugs

The slug is the page's own part of the address. If you leave it empty, it is made from the page's title when you first save: lower case, with spaces and punctuation turned into hyphens, so "Opening hours & prices" becomes opening-hours-prices. A slug you type may hold letters, digits, hyphens and underscores, and it must differ from the slugs of the other pages under the same parent.

The slug is made once. Renaming the page later does not change it, which is deliberate: a change to the title never breaks a link. Editing the slug of a live page does change its address, and the old address then answers "not found" unless you add a redirect (see Custom URLs and redirects).

Position

Pages under the same parent have a position, and that is the order the site lists them in. You change it by dragging pages in the list. Position is separate from the title, so you can order pages by importance rather than alphabetically.

The tree is not the menu

Menus are built separately, in Menus:

  • A page can exist without appearing in any menu, which suits a landing page you link to directly.
  • A menu can point at something that is not a page: a blog, a record of another kind, or another site.
  • Reordering pages does not reorder a menu, and the other way round.

So "I moved the page and the menu did not change" is expected. How menus work explains menus.

Where a page belongs

Put a page under the parent that matches how visitors look for it, not how your team is organised. The address is part of what visitors see, and one that reads sensibly aloud is usually right. Pages that stand alone, such as campaign or legal pages, can sit directly under the home page.