Customization is not a new web design trend; it’s common practice. Modern WordPress is all about customization because users can adjust everything. Some say that the idea to customize as much as possible was the first step towards turning WordPress into a CMS. Plugins, data structuring, and post grouping were the next logical steps.

The term Custom Post Type (or CPT) goes hand-in-hand with the words “taxonomy” and “meta fields.”  These words may sound a bit scary for beginners, but it’s actually not because it’s simply about the content structure. 

In this article, I will give you all the explanations and examples to understand this concept.

Table of Contents

• The Concept of WordPress Post Types
• Default Post Types
• What are Custom Post Types?
• 5 Custom Post Types Usage Examples
• WordPress Custom Post Types Plugins
  • Advanced Custom Fields
  • Custom Post Type UI
  • Pods
  • Custom Post Type Maker
  • Meta Box
  • JetEngine
• Conclusion

The Concept of WordPress Post Types

Let’s start from the beginning: what are WordPress post types?

Post types (default and custom) are content types used to structurize content on your website. Just like in the kitchen, you have cups in the kitchen cupboard, milk – in the fridge, and shoes somewhere in the wardrobe, and thanks to this order, you can always find what you need. Just imagine if there were only one big shelf in your apartment, with cutlery, shoes, groceries, clothes, detergents, and wrenches all in one place. What a mess, right, and every time you would have to spend a good half an hour to find something in this huge pile. That’s why we have closets, cabinets, and drawers and distribute them in different rooms: kitchen, laundry, and wardrobe. 

WordPress, as a CMS, also needs this kind of order for the content. That’s why post types exist. 

Default Post Types

Before talking about custom post types, let’s first define default WordPress post types. Using the previous apartment analogy, imagine that you buy a semi-furnished apartment, where you already have some basic furniture for daily life, so you will have where to sleep, eat and store your things right after moving in. So do WordPress have something similar – the default post types, so you can use them right after WordPress installation and add some content? 

But if you want to add something specific that will fit your lifestyle, routine, and tastes, you buy your own custom furniture. The same story with WordPress custom post types – if the default post type functionality is not enough for your goals, you add custom, particularly for your content and site structure. 

So let’s get back to default WordPress post types. There are seven:

• Posts – they can be organized in categories and by tags, displayed in reverse sequence (the newest first);
• Pages – not organized in categories and by tags and can be hierarchical (have child pages);
• Attachments – used to store media and their meta information;
• Revisions – to store a history of edits for other post types, so you can rollback changes;
• Navigation Menus – all kinds of navigation menus to be displayed on the site;
• Custom CSS – custom CSS code edited via Customizer;
• Changesets – history of edits for Customizer.

What Are Custom Post Types?

Most tutorials on this topic use the same example: you have a bookselling site, so you will create a custom post type (CPT) named “Books” to publish these books as posts. Such a WordPress custom post type will have a layout, options, and meta fields. It’s a pretty vague explanation, isn’t it?

First, let’s look at the advantages you get when creating a custom content type:

• A separate menu item in the dashboard to have a better menu structure and clear structure. In the example below, there are Tickets, Properties, Cars, and Team Members are custom post types:

• Custom meta fields can be created and assigned to the particular CPT to fill in and store specific data separately (to fetch in on the front end later in the correct order). This is an example of how the Property CPT may look for the vacation directory site:

• Custom templates for that particular CPT to display the post content and all the meta fields properly, having not only the title, the content, and the featured image (like in the most standard templates). 
• Custom taxonomies (categories and tags for a specific post type) can be created to organize those CPTs and create custom archives for them.

The most frequently used custom post type is the WooCommerce Product post type. It has a lot of custom meta fields, such as Price, Short/Long Description, etc., and a template. All of the mentioned are being added to the site when the WooCommerce plugin is installed. But you can create as many custom post types as you need. 

So far, I see only benefits in using CPTs:

• CPTs provide easy input and update of grouped data;
• CPTs categorize data and make it more consistent;
• CPTs make the website more SEO-friendly.

5 Custom Post Types Usage Examples

Traditionally, users create WordPress custom post types for content like film catalogs, music, recipes, poems, products, calendars, testimonials, etc. Let’s look at some real WordPress sites with custom posts. I hope these examples will help you to understand them better.

The design studio Studio Koch uses WordPress custom post types to demonstrate its portfolio of completed projects. This portfolio includes different projects (brochures, a radio website, a business card, CD covers), but all these posts have the same fields and a similar layout. 

Here you see the homepage of this studio’s website.

If you click on the Modulex post, you’ll see the CPT layout.

Hi-Speed Simuladores use WordPress custom post types as a showcase for their products. CPT components include texts and photos. Sometimes, carousels can be spotted too.

The Watermark Collection uses WordPress custom post types for its product page layout, including photos, links, texts, and attachments. 

Floraria Azalee has photos, texts, videos, testimonials, and carousels. As you can see, WordPress’s custom post types can include dynamic content to add glitz and glamor to your site.

Emerald Guitars has photos, texts, videos, testimonials, and carousels. As you can see, WordPress’s custom post types can include dynamic content to add glitz and glamor to your site.

I’d like to say that website development is close to real estate 一 you build a structure first. There are no types of widgets that cannot be included in CPTs because there is a place for everything. So, the next section of this article explains how to build custom post types.

WordPress Custom Post Types Plugins

WordPress has no built-in interface for custom post type creation. Therefore, the question “How to create a custom post type in WordPress?” remains more relevant than ever. There are two solutions to add the new WordPress custom post type to your site:

• manually by adding some code;
• using a WordPress custom post type plugin. 

Coding needs specific skills, but making use of a custom post type plugin is more effortless and intuitive. For instance, they add a CPT section to the WordPress admin panel and allow you to customize slugs.

On the other hand, every plugin limits you by the number of field types you can specify. Let’s focus on using plugins for the easy creation of custom post types. 

Advanced Custom Fields

Developer: Delicious Brains.

Key features: Advanced Custom Fields is one of the most popular WordPress plugins to add meta fields to any part of custom posts. This plugin adds custom fields to posts, including custom post types, taxonomies, users, media files, comments, and menus. It proposes 30+ types of fields to create an unlimited number of custom post types. No wonder it is intended for developers. ACF is a lightweight but powerful plugin. 

This plugin manages CPT efficiently through a straightforward and functional interface. 

Cons: You need to edit your theme’s code to create a layout.

Pricing: $49/year for one site.

Custom Post Type UI

Developer: WebDevStudios.

Features: Custom Post Type UI is a full-featured free CPT and taxonomy building plugin with a simple and intuitive console interface. The CPT UI plugin provides advanced functionality for labeling post types, adds arbitrary types to built-in or manually created custom post types, imports custom posts, thumbnails, quotes, and exports CPTs. Custom Post Type UI generates code of CPT creation to add to your theme’s functions.php file. 

Cons: no functionality for adding custom (meta) fields – that’s why it used to work in tandem with ACF.

Pricing: CPT UI has free and extended versions ($29).

Pods

Developer: Pods Framework Team.

Key features: Pods is a free plugin with many possibilities, especially considering a lot of add-ons it has. With Pods you can build almost any type of content and pages (with PHP script) that are easy to manage. It extends the standard content types (post types, taxonomies, media, users, testimonials). The plugin creates not only custom page types but adds custom fields to custom taxonomies. Use the plugin to establish relations between data, create custom menus, and manage users’ permissions. As you see, this plugin covers almost all needs in this area.

Cons: this plugin was built by volunteers, so it could do with more insightful tutorials that are understandable for newbie WordPress users. It also doesn’t offer repeater fields, and Pods’s editor needs to be updated.

Pricing: free.

Custom Post Type Marker

Developer: Graffino.

Features: Custom Post Type Marker is a convenient open-source plugin. It creates both custom post types and taxonomies and uses separate interface sections for each of them. Custom Post Type Marker manages arbitrary post types, such as regular posts and pages. This plugin is fully integrated with the WordPress API and supports all CPT API options.

Cons: it doesn’t have functionality for adding custom fields.

Pricing: free.

Meta Box

Developer: MetaBox.io.

Features: Meta Box is an open-source and fully-fledged plugin that is much appreciated by web developers. It provides developers with 40+ meta fields to create CPTs as complex as possible. This plugin extends site functionality and is easy to use due to fast integration codes and the absence of admin pages or complicated plugin options.

Meta Box works with any theme, plugin, and website. It is fully compatible with WordPress import and export features. In addition, there are a lot of guides and tutorials for Meta Box.  

Cons: Meta Box is an advanced plugin mainly for developers (so coding skills are necessary).

Pricing: $149/year for an unlimited number of sites.

JetEngine

Developer: Crocoblock.

Features: JetEngine is a powerful and lightweight custom post type plugin, and I’d like to pay more attention to it. The plugin’s focus is dynamic website structure, contrary to other plugins concentrating on the traditional website structure. The word dynamic encompasses a lot that exceeds other plugins: 

• dynamic website structure;
• dynamic listing items (dynamic images, terms, links, fields, data stores, tags, meta);
• listing grid layout (including grids, injections, sliders, maps, calendars, and carousels);
• dynamic features (functions, tags, shortcodes, conditional logic, macros);
• dynamic visibility of the web page elements based on meta field values, user data, and other rules (data stores, glossary);
• visualization tools for dynamic content, including Charts and Tables Builders;
• dynamic user profiles and profile menu widgets.

In terms of CPT, this plugin focuses not only on CPTs but custom content types, custom fields, and taxonomies (to group posts) and adds metadata to post types. JetEngine manages static and dynamic elements, allowing you to set post relations. It can create custom field storage and collect all page options in one place. Besides detailed documentation, REST API and Query Builder are also included.

Cons: it is rather complicated for inexperienced users. 

Pricing: $43 per year for one website and $88 per year for unlimited websites.

Conclusion

WordPress custom post type plugins make website development easier for all users regardless of their experience. Using plugins, you can categorize custom post types into a custom taxonomy and customize posts the way you wish. Often, no coding skills are necessary. 

WordPress custom post types expanded the scope of WordPress from simple blogs to complex e-shops and marketplaces. These broad definitions cover various sites, including culinary sites with recipes, bookstores, web designer portfolios, art stores, curio shops, and real estate listings. This list has no end because CPT functionality is unlimited, and custom post types make websites more SEO-friendly and visible to Google. Artful CPT layouts make your site stand out from the crowd.

The WordPress custom post type plugins are diverse: there are pro and free versions, for beginners and advanced users, for coding lovers, and for people unfamiliar with programming.

This article focuses mainly on WordPress plugin usage and the scope of their application because it is the most convenient way to add CPTs to your sites. The plugins presented here have their pros and cons, but all of these plugins do a great job of helping you create custom post types in WordPress.