Cleo Schoenfelder reflecting on her journey of building websites since 2010 and finally understanding how pillar pages organize content into meaningful sections.
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What the Heck Is a Pillar Page… and Who Comes Up With These Names?

ByCleo Schoenfelder

📖 The Journey

I built my first website in 2010.

If you had told me then that I’d still be learning website terminology sixteen years later, I probably would have laughed.

Back then, I thought building a website meant putting words and pictures on the internet.

Instead, I found myself learning an entirely new language.

Themes.

Templates.

Patterns.

Blocks.

Plugins.

Widgets.

Categories.

Tags.

WordPress.com.

WordPress.org.

Pillar Pages.

I remember reading article after article thinking…

“Does everyone else understand this except me?”

Around 2016, everyone kept saying,

“You need pillar pages.”

I nodded my head…

…and secretly had absolutely no idea what they meant.

For years, I kept hearing the same advice without really understanding it.

It wasn’t until recently, while rebuilding my own website, that everything finally clicked.

Rooted & Rising.

Rooted Living.

Real Life Finds.

Simple Starts.

Those weren’t just pages anymore.

They became the main sections of my website.

Instead of asking,

“What is a pillar page?”

I finally started asking,

“Where does this belong?”

That one question changed everything.

I wasn’t organizing pages anymore.

I was organizing my life.

✨ Key Notes

  • Built my first website in 2010.
  • First heard the term Pillar Page around 2016.
  • Spent years hearing the terminology without truly understanding it.
  • The concept finally clicked while organizing cleoschoenfelder.com.
  • Pillar Pages aren’t just for SEO—they create structure for both the creator and the reader.

💡 Cleo’s Plain English

Theme – The overall design of your website.

Template – The layout for a specific type of page.

Pattern – A group of blocks already designed and ready to customize.

Block – One piece of content, like a paragraph, image, button, or heading.

Pillar Page – Think of it as the bookshelf in your library. It introduces one main topic and connects readers to everything else you’ve written about it.

For me, those bookshelves became:

🌾 Rooted & Rising

🌿 Rooted Living

🛒 Real Life Finds

✨ Simple Starts

Once I looked at my website that way…

Everything finally had a place to belong.

❤️ From My Journal

Looking back, I don’t think I was struggling to understand WordPress.

I was struggling to understand the language.

Sometimes we hear a definition a hundred times…

But it isn’t until we connect it to our own experience that everything suddenly makes sense.

It took me sixteen years to realize I wasn’t just building a website.

I was building a home for everything I’d been creating all along.

And honestly…

That realization was worth every confusing term I had to learn along the way.

What Clicked for Me

I stopped thinking of pillar pages as an SEO strategy and started thinking of them as the bookshelves in my library.

Once every part of my life had a place to belong…

My website finally did too.

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