How to Bulk Create Multiple Pages in WordPress

Creating a single post or page in WordPress is easy enough, but some websites necessitate a whole lot of pages. Wouldn’t it be nice if there were a way to automate that? It would, and there is, and we are about to show it to you. In this tutorial, we will be showing you how to create bulk pages in WordPress using a free plugin. But before we begin, we’d like to discuss some use cases for bulk page creation.

Let’s get right down to it.

Why Bulk Create Pages

Before you start creating pages left and right, let us examine whether you really need them. A bunch of pages with similar content may result in content duplication, for one, and that alone is bad enough. However, more importantly, your website may be perceived as spam by search engines, and you might get a poor ranking as a result.

You can avoid this by making sure you are creating a website useful for your visitors: that is, don’t overcrowd your website with pages with similar content if your visitors won’t use them. So what kind of a website needs a lot of pages?

If you are offering a similar service localized for different countries, you might resort to using Weglot as a way of switching through languages. Weglot, however, is a premium plugin. You could instead resort to creating different pages for different languages, and create them in bulk. You might also be running a retail or restaurant chain. Sure, a map with all your location pins might do the job, but you could easily create a large number of pages for each of your locations, each containing similar but different data such as location maps, contact information, opening hours, and so on. Profile pages for each of your staff? You could be done with the outlines in minutes.

How to Bulk Create Multiple Pages Using a Plugin

The plugin we’ve chosen for this demonstration is Page Generator. With this free plugin, we will generate a range of pages for individual brick-and-mortar branches of a business, but it will work just as well for any kind of page.

After having installed and activated the plugin, you will find a new option in the right hand-side menu of your WordPress dashboard. This plugin uses a system of keywords to create pages. So, to start, navigate to Page Generator/Keywords.

Once there, click the Create first keyword button.

On the next screen, you need to add a keyword and its associated terms. As we are building pages for physical locations, we will enter street for our Keyword and four placeholder street names for our Terms. You, of course, can enter your own data as needed. Once done, click the Save button.

With the plugin’s free version, we are limited to local input. The premium version of the plugin allows for mass data import using CSV files.

Once you have saved your keyword successfully, you should get a status message. Then, navigate to Page Generator/Generate Content.

Here, you can generate a page template (content group) as you would any other page. You can use any keyword you have previously defined in the title, the main body of text, and the permalink for the page. Simply enter the keyword in curly brackets wherever you want it to appear.

In our example, we have added the keyword {street} in the title, in the body, and in the permalink. You can, of course, use any number of keywords you want for the number of pages you need to generate.

You can also select the author for each page (in our case, it is admin) or assign a random user as author for each page. If you wish to allow comments or pingbacks, you can do so by checking the boxes below.

Once done, click the Publish or Update button to save your content group.

Now, to actually generate the pages, you need the right-hand side sidebar. In the Generation section, you can select the Method of page generation and set the Number of Posts. For Method, we have selected All, meaning that all possible combinations of keywords will be generated. In our case, it is easy enough, as we only have one keyword. For the number of posts, we went with 4, as we have four terms in our {street} keyword, and we want pages for all of our locations.

In the Attributes section, you can select a page template. We went with the Default Template for our demonstration.

Finally, in the Actions section, you can Test your configuration to see whether it works, or you can simply click the Generate via Browser button.

You will be prompted to allow the generator to create pages. Click the OK button.

You can then follow Page Generator’s progress. As you can see, our simple configuration did not throw up any errors. Once we get the Finished notification, the pages should be generated.

You can check if the plugin has generated all the requisite pages in the Pages section of your WordPress dashboard.

And, as you can see, all our page content has been generated as required.

In Conclusion

Automation saves time and energy, whether yours or your staff’s. In this tutorial, we have shown how you can automate your workflow using a free plugin to create bulk pages in WordPress. Of course, you need to populate the pages created with the content your users need to see, but bulk page creation itself is easy and quick: you can create however many pages you need within minutes and with just a minute amount of effort. For our purposes, even the free version of the Page Generator plugin worked just fine, and we are sure it’ll do the job for you, too.