Essential Pages for Your Blog

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Once your website is set up, it’s time to create essential pages. Essential pages are certain pages that every blog should have.

These essential pages include:

  • About Page
  • Contact Page
  • Privacy Policy

Each of these should be a Page in WordPress, as opposed to a Post. The reason is that pages are meant to be for static content that won’t get updated too often.

Let’s cover each of these pages…

About Page

About pages are recommended because they help demonstrate EEAT (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trust). Basically, it makes your website look more professional and users are more likely to trust your website. As your website grows, this will become more important.

There are different ways to create an About page, so don’t think one way is better than the other. Every About page will look different depending on what the website is about, how old it is, and the team behind the website.

Here are different sections you can include on your About page:

  • About: What’s the purpose of the website, when it was created, and what can readers expect to find?
  • Our story: What’s the history behind the website? Why was it created?
  • Our values: What are the website’s values? What’s the content creation process like? What do you do that’s different?
  • Featured on: Have you been mentioned or featured on any websites or publications?
  • Follow us: How can readers get more involved with your brand? Do you have a mailing list or social pages they can follow?
  • Our team: Who writes for the blog? What is their position and what is their experience?
  • Our favorites: This is a nice little way to show off your recommended products with affiliate links.

If you’re not an expert in your niche, that’s okay. It’s perfectly fine to say on your About page that you are sharing what you’ve learned.

Here are some examples of various about pages. Feel free to read them to get ideas to craft your own page:

One aspect of having a great About page is having bio photos. A bio photo is just a picture of the blogger behind the website. Even if the content is outsourced to various writers, it’s good to still have a bio photo.

The best bio photos are real photos in the niche setting. For example, if you have a camping website, show a picture of you camping. Or if you have a cooking website, be in the kitchen or beside a yummy looking dish. A selfie can be perfectly fine. The idea is your photo should be authentic and show that experience.

I make a point to say that the photo should be authentic because a lot of times, bloggers often use stock photos or even worse, AI generated photos. Now, if you can’t get an authentic photo of yourself, a stock photo can work. Ideally, you want to find photos that look the most real. For example, if you get a picture of a car mechanic, you don’t really want a photoshopped picture of someone in a clean pressed outfit. How come? Because real mechanic work is often dirty. People know and appreciate authenticity when they see it.

Contact Page

Contact pages are pretty simple and are good to have. Not only does it show that you are reachable, but someone might contact you for partnership opportunities or even be interested in buying your website. I personally received some free products to review which is always nice.

In most cases, a simple contact page will be fine. You can have a short message like “Hey there! If you want to get in touch, just send me a message below and I’ll do my best to get back to you as soon as possible – thanks!” Then, you can have a WordPress plugin like Contact Form 7 so users can email you. I recommend integrating the contact form with Google captcha so you don’t get a ton of spam messages.

Privacy Policy

Now for the privacy policy page. Some bloggers get worried about these official sounding legal pages, but they can be really easy. Some lawyers may yell at me for this, but I’ve been creating privacy policies for free using online generators for all my sites (except for KeywordChef.com, which I did hire a professional for). Being involved in various blogging and SEO communities for years, I have yet to hear of someone ever getting in legal trouble. I’m not saying it doesn’t happen, but it’s extremely rare and only happens to huge bloggers. If you are worried, you can always buy official legal pages as your website grows.

So where do I get these free privacy policies for my sites? My favorite resource is https://www.privacypolicygenerator.info. There are other generators out there, but this one covers the Google DART Cookie. The reason why this is important is because to get approved for Google Adsense, you need this section on your page.

Where should essential pages be on the website?

One mistake I see new bloggers make is putting these pages in the main navigation of their website. This is the wrong way to do it. A much better location for these pages would be in the footer of the website instead. This is because the top navigation should be for only pages that you want your users to access first. Remember, users want to find things easily and quickly. Most of the time they won’t be interested in reading a boring privacy policy page, so adding it to the top navigation will just add clutter. Plus, having essential pages in the footer is standard practice and users already know where to find them.

So, what you’ll want to do is create a new navigation menu in WordPress (call it “footer nav”), then add the essential pages there. You’ll probably need to add the nav to a footer widget. I usually like to place them in the order I listed them earlier: About, Contact, Privacy Policy. Users scan pages left to right, so you want to put the most popular pages first. Nobody reads privacy pages so that’s why it’s last.