The Page Options setting allows you to set page parents and templates, and to change the order of your pages.

It can be found on the left side of the page editor.

Parent Page

You can arrange your pages in hierarchies by selecting a top level page for your other pages. Pages that are under a parent page are called child pages. For example, you could have an “About” parent page that has “Life Story” and “My Dogs” child pages under it. Under “My Dogs” you might have another page titled “Rosco”. The URLs might look like this:

• http://example.wordpress.com/about/
• http://example.wordpress.com/about/life-story/
• http://example.wordpress.com/about/my-dogs/
• http://example.wordpress.com/about/my-dogs/rosco/

Note: Some page slugs, such as “author,” “tag,” and “category” are reserved for special uses. You can’t create a child page if the parent page uses one of those reserved slugs.

With the Twenty Eleven theme activated, it would look like this:

There are no limits to how deeply you can nest pages.

Note: Not all themes display Page hierarchies by default in the navigation menu. If this is the case with the theme you are using, then you can use the Custom Menus feature to create sub-pages and to customize your navigation menus.

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Template

Some themes have additional templates that you can use to create pages with additional features or custom layouts. You can see if your current theme has any additional templates by checking the Template section of the Page Options module. The most common templates are for archives, links, and contact pages.

For example, the Bueno theme has additional templates that make it easy to create an Archives page, Full Width page, and Sitemap:

Users cannot modify the templates or add their own. You can only select from the list, which depends on the theme you have activated.

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Order

You can change the order that your pages are displayed by using the Order field of the Page Options module.

Let’s say you have three pages: About, Photos, Contact

If you wanted About to appear first, you’d need to do the following:

1. Go to Pages in your dashboard
2. Find the page About and click the title.
3. Locate the Page Options module to the left of the editor.
4. Put the number 1 in the box for Order. This tells WordPress to display this page first on your site.
5. Click the Update button.

Repeat the process for your other pages, but use higher numbers for the Order field: 2, 3, etc. This tells WordPress to display these pages second and third on your blog.

If you’re using the Pages Widget, be sure to set the Sort by option to Page Order after setting a custom order for your pages. Then click Save & Publish.