How To Find Your Post ID in WordPress (3 Ways)

Are you trying to locate your post ID? You may need your post ID when you are working with specific plugins on your blog and wish to include certain posts only. Even though it seems complicated, finding your posts ID is very simple and doesn’t require any coding. There are 3 easy ways to find the ID of any of your WordPress posts.

In this post, I’m going to show you the best way of finding the ID of any of your WordPress posts quickly first without plugins, and then with plugins. For that I’ll show you two free plugins you can use so that you can find your post ID in no time.

But I’ll also show you how to find your page ID and category ID in WordPress since you might need it if you want to display specific pages or categories in specific sections only as you do with posts.

No matter why you need your post IDs, it’s always good to know how to get them.

If you’re thinking of starting a blog, I have a free short tutorial that will walk you through the necessary steps, so by the time you finish reading the post, you’ll have your blog set up.

What is a WordPress post ID?

A post ID is a unique number for a post. Every time you create a new post, WordPress assigns this new post a unique post ID.

This is necessary because every piece of content sits on a specific page on the WordPress site. To identify each piece of content, WordPress needs to assign a unique post ID to each post.

This unique ID number is typically not visible to you since it’s done in the backend of the WordPress editor to help organize your WordPress database.

A post ID number is usually between 1 and 4 digits long.

Why do you need your post ID?

You need your post ID if you want to use custom code within your WordPress theme or use a WordPress plugin to display specific posts only. If you want the plugin to display certain posts and not others, you’ll have to enter the ID of the post you want to be displayed.

WordPress page IDs, or category IDs

A WordPress page ID, or category ID, works similarly to a WordPress post ID. 

Therefore, I will briefly show how you can locate the page’s ID as well as the category ID in this post.

But let’s start with finding your post ID first.

3 Easy ways to find your post ID

There are 3 simple methods to locate the posts ID of your WordPress website.

So let me show you the different ways I use to find the WordPress IDs of each post.

1. Find the post ID within the post section of WordPress

The easiest way to locate your posts ID is via the posts menu in your WordPress dashboard. Navigate to “posts” and hover your mouse pointer over the title of the post to reveal its ID.

Take a look at my screen grab below where I show you what it looks like.

Alternatively, you can click on “Edit” and you’ll see your posts ID in your browser, which brings us to method number 2.

2. Find the post ID in your web browser

Another way to find your post ID is to look in the URL bar on your browser of the selected post.

If you are unable to see your post ID on your web browser, you might want to review how your permalinks are set up under “Settings” in your WordPress dashboard.

Because the post ID may not be visible in your web browser if your permalinks are not set up correctly.

That means if your permalinks are set to “numeric” or “plain” you won’t see your post’s ID.

As long as your permalinks are set to “post name” you’ll see your post ID using the methods I’ve shown.

However, be careful when changing your permalink structure once your blog is live, as this will break all your post links, Pinterest pin links, and will adversely affect your traffic.

So, what should you do if your permalink structure is set to one of the above that does not display your posts ID?

If this is the case, you can use a plugin as I will explain next. Let’s dig in.

3. Find your post ID with free WordPress plugins

When you have many posts to manage or your permalink settings don’t support IDs, plugins are extremely helpful and can save you a lot of time.

Let me show you two free plugins you can use.

The first one is Show IDs by DraftPress. With this super lightweight plugin, you don’t need to configure anything.

As soon as you activate the plugin, you’ll see an extra column with your post’s unique ID together with the post title, and the number of posts altogether.

Let me show you what that looks like on my blog.

But this plugin also works for the following IDs:

• posts
• pages (I’ll show you next)
• categories (I’ll show you next)
• tag ID
• links
• media ID
• user ID
• comment ID
• link categories
• custom taxonomies
• custom post types

This means that once you install this plugin, all of the above-mentioned IDs will be displayed without you having to manually search for them. 

So let’s take a look at what that looks like for your page ID. As you can see, similar to your post’s ID, the plugin adds an extra column to your screen options to display the ID.

Lastly, I’ll show you what it looks like for your category ID before you can check out the remaining IDs for yourself.

The second plugin I want to show you is called Reveal IDs.

This free plugin has similar features to the first one. The only difference is that with this plugin you can sort by your IDs and organize them ascending or descending.

If you want to hide the ID column on certain pages, simply untick the box under screen settings. Both plugins support this.

Find your Page ID and Category ID without a plugin

Before we wrap up, I want to quickly show you how easily you can find your page ID or category ID  without the need for a plugin (but the same applies for tag IDs, comment IDs, user IDs, tax IDs, and so on).

As with finding your post ID, hover your mouse pointer over the page to reveal its ID. The page ID is also referred to as the post ID, so don’t be confused. 

Alternatively, you can click “Edit” and find your ID in the browser.

Closing thoughts on how to find your post ID in WordPress

I hope that this post has given you clear action steps on how to find your post ID as well as your page ID and category with or without a plugin.

Let me know if you found this helpful. Or did I miss something? Let me know your favorite way to find your post ID in the comments.