Setting Page Order and Parent/Child Pages

Pages on the site can be nested under one another — a “Safeguarding” page might sit under “About Us”, for example — and the order they appear in menus or listings can be controlled directly. This page explains how parent/child relationships and page order work, and where they show up.

What a parent page does

Setting a parent page nests one page underneath another in the site’s structure. This affects two things: the page’s web address (child pages often inherit the parent’s URL path, e.g. /about-us/safeguarding/) and how the page appears in navigation — many menus and page-listing blocks group child pages under their parent automatically.

It does not automatically add the page to the main menu — that’s a separate step, covered in the article on editing the main menu.

Setting a parent page

1. Open the page you want to nest, in the editor.
2. Open the Page settings panel on the right (the gear icon, if not already showing).
3. Look for the Page Attributes section.
4. Click the Parent Page dropdown and select the page you want this one to sit underneath, or choose (no parent) to make it a top-level page.
5. Update or publish the page to save the change.

Changing the parent of an existing, already-published page can change its web address. If the page is linked to from elsewhere, or indexed by search engines, check with us before changing the parent of a live page — we can help make sure old links still redirect properly.

Setting the page order

Within the same Page Attributes panel, you’ll find an Order field. This is a number that controls where the page sits relative to its siblings (other pages with the same parent, or other top-level pages) wherever an automatic page list is used — for example, a sub-navigation menu or a “child pages” block.

• Lower numbers appear first — a page set to 0 will typically appear before a page set to 10.
• Pages with the same order number usually fall back to alphabetical order.
• Leaving it at 0 for everything is fine if you don’t need a specific sequence — most sites only need this for a handful of key pages.

Where this shows up

Parent/child structure and page order affect:

• Automatic sub-navigation menus that list child pages of the current section.
• Breadcrumb trails, which follow the parent chain (see the separate article on breadcrumbs).
• Any “List of Pages” style block used to build an index page manually.

It does not affect the main menu directly — that’s built and ordered by hand, separately, so a page won’t appear there automatically just because it has a parent set.

Tips

• Keep nesting to two or three levels deep at most — very deep page structures get hard for visitors to navigate and for you to manage.
• If you’re not sure whether a page should have a parent, think about whether it’s a standalone topic (top-level) or a detail/sub-topic of something else (child).
• Get in touch before restructuring a large section of the site — moving several pages around can affect multiple URLs and menu items at once.