Q&A: Is a website and a web page the same thing?

By Rick Rouse
I particularly like this one.   Abiquiunews.com is a website but like a book its filled with many pages.   Be sure to click around on the navigation at the top.

Question from Martina:  I have an Internet question for you, Rick.
I keep hearing the terms "website" and "web page" and I find them a little confusing. Is there a difference between the two or do they both mean the same thing?

Rick's answer:  Martina, the terms "website" and "web page" are closely related but they in fact refer to two different things. Some people use them interchangeably, but that isn’t really accurate.

A web page is a single "page" of information that's located at a specific URL (i.e. web address) on a web server.

A website is a collection of web pages that fall under a common domain name.
To use a simple analogy, a web page is similar to a single page in a book. You can open a book to any specific page and read that page independently of all the other pages that are contained within that book.

​A website on the other hand is similar to an entire book. This is because a website is a collection all the web pages that are contained within it.

A typical website will have all of its associated web pages accessible via the same domain name, but each individual page will be located at its own individual URL within that domain.
Just as you can pick up a book and open it to any page and start reading that page, you can visit a specific page on a website without having to visit the home page first.

Here are just a few of the ways you could end up with a web page displayed in your browser:
1 - By selecting a search result for a query you perform on a search engine
2 - By clicking a link to the page on another website
3 - By typing the URL of the page directly into your browser's address bar
4 - By clicking on an online ad
5 - By taking one of numerous other possible actions that result in you viewing a web page in your browser
​
Lets take my tech blog as an example (a blog is actually nothing more than a special type of website). The URL for the home page of my blog is:
https://www.ricksdailytips.com
The ricksdailytips.com part of the URL is the actual domain name, and every page on the blog will have ricksdailytips.com in the root section of the URL.
The following URLs refer to individual web pages contained within the overall Rick’s Daily Tips website:

• My "About Rick" page:   https://www.ricksdailytips.com/about-rick/
• My "Contact Me" page:   https://www.ricksdailytips.com/contact/
• A typical post page:   https://www.ricksdailytips.com/skipping-the-clicking/

I hope this clears it up for you, Martina. Thanks for asking such a great question.