Posts
If you are using WordPress as a blog, you will end up using posts for majority of your site’s content. Posts are content of entries listed in reversely chronological order on home page of your blog. Due to their reversely chronological order, your posts are arranged timely. Older posts are archived based on month and year. As the older posts become, the deeper the user has to dig to find it. You also have the option to organize your posts based on categories and tags.
Because WordPress posts are published with time and date, they are syndicated through the RSS feeds. This allows your readers to be notified with the most recent update of posts via RSS feeds. Bloggers can use the RSS feeds to deliver email broadcasts through services like Aweber or MailChimp. You can create a daily and weekly newsletter to your audience to subscribe. The very timely nature of posts make it extremely social. You can use one of the many social sharing plugins to allow your users to share your posts in social media networks like Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn etc.
Posts encourage conversation. They have a built-in commenting feature that allows users to comment on a particular topic. You can access your Settings » Discussion to turn off comments on older posts if you like.
Pages
Pages are meant to be static “one-off” type content such as bout page, privacy policy, legal disclaimers, etc. While the WordPress database stores the published date of the page, pages contain timeless entities. For example, “about” page is not supposed to expire. Make sure you can go back and make it update, but you will not have about page 2012, about page 2013 etc. Because there is no time and date tied with pages, they are not included in your RSS feeds by default. Pages are not social in most cases thus do not include social sharing buttons, or comments.
You don’t want users to comment on your contact page, or on your legal disclaimers page. Just like you probably don’t want others to tweet your privacy policy page in most cases.
Unlike posts, pages are hierarchical by nature. For example, you can have a sub pages within a page. A example of this in action would be our Blueprint page. This feature allows you to organize your pages together, and even assign a custom template to these pages.
WordPress by default comes with a feature that allows you to create custom page templates using your theme. This allows developers to customize the look of each page when necessary. In most themes, post and pages look the same. But when you use your page to create a landing page, or a gallery page, then this custom page templates feature comes in very handy.
Pages also have this archaic feature called Order that lets you customize the order of pages by assigning a number value to it. However, this feature is extended by plugins like Simple Page Ordering that enables you to drag & drop the order of pages.