Configuring Page Settings

Once you’ve decided which page types to use, you need to understand how to configure them to meet your business requirements. Going beyond the drag-and-drop page editor interface, Liferay empowers content managers with a granular level of control over the permissions, metadata, design, and SEO preferences of every site page.

In this lesson, you’ll survey several of the available configuration options you can use to tailor the performance and appearance of your pages.

Page Permissions

With Liferay’s role-based access control, you can configure permissions on a page by page basis. Permissions for individual pages override any default permissions that are applied at the site level. For each role in your Liferay instance, you can toggle permissions to view, update, delete, and configure the content on a given page.

Well-defined content access is one of the pillars of Clarity’s information architecture. Always use the principle of least privilege (PoLP) to ensure that every user role has the minimum access it needs to perform its business function. This user-centered design approach helps managers, creators, administrators, and other users maintain and collaborate on content more effectively.

Page Metadata

In the General tab of the page configuration interface, you can define the metadata of a page, from basic identifying information to content classification.

Name

Set your page’s display name, with the option to hide it from the page hierarchy menu display. Use clear, descriptive names that indicate the purpose or function of the page’s content.

Friendly URL

Define your page’s URL using keyword-rich strings. Avoid query strings and long numeric IDs. At page creation, the name and friendly URL are defined together, but they can be configured independently afterwards. As a best practice, you should update these metadata attributes together so that they match.

Categorization

Apply categories and tags to classify your page’s content. Use categories to group pages by their content, purpose, format, or some other shared characteristic. As your content base grows, categories help you build a structured, hierarchical classification system for your pages.

Tags are a freeform, user-driven method of classifying pages with keywords. They are neither structured nor hierarchical. Tags enable users to search and filter content by specific characteristics that may not be captured with categories. Used together, categories and tags enhance your page’s discoverability and your site’s overall information architecture.

Page Design

In the Design tab of the page configuration interface, you can tailor the look and feel of your page to fit your organization’s branding and visual identity.

• Basic Settings: Select and apply design elements that are part of your site’s theme, including the favicon, master page, and style book.
• Customization: Leverage Liferay’s frontend client extensions to inject custom CSS and JavaScript code to override the theme.

See Mastering Liferay Design Elements to learn more.

Page SEO

In the SEO tab of the page configuration interface, you can define HTML meta tags and configure sitemap settings to help search engines better navigate and understand your page’s content.

Settings

The HTML meta tags in this section determine how search engines interpret and render your page’s identifying information.

• HTML Title: This meta tag specifies the page title shown in your browser tab and search results.
• Description: This meta tag specifies the short descriptive text that appears below the URL in the page's search listing.
• Canonical URL: This meta tag is used to mark your preferred page when you have multiple URLs with duplicate or similar content.
• Keywords: This meta tag specifies standard SEO keywords for your page. Although keywords are less relevant in modern SEO, they can still be useful in boosting your page’s search ranking.
• Robots: This meta tag is used to provide instructions to web crawlers and bots that navigate your site pages. With rules like noindex and nofollow, you can instruct search engines to ignore your page and any links it contains.

This section also provides a live preview window to see how your page will be rendered in a list of search results.

Sitemap

If enabled, Liferay can automatically generate an XML sitemap for your site that contains a list of all available page URLs. The sitemap also contains additional metadata for each page, such as when it was last updated, its change frequency, and its importance relative to other site pages.

In the sitemap configuration for an individual page, you can specify the following metadata:

• Include: This option determines whether or not the page is included in the sitemap.
• Page Priority: This value rates the priority of the page on a scale from 1.0 (highest) to 0.0 (lowest). The priority value should reflect the page’s position in the overall hierarchy of your site.
• Change Frequency: This attribute indicates how often the page is updated with a range of predefined frequency values (Always, Hourly, Daily, Weekly, Monthly, Yearly, or Never). The change frequency tells search engines how often they should crawl this page to fetch the most updated version.

Proper sitemap configuration helps search engines efficiently crawl and index your site, improving discoverability.

Conclusion

Liferay provides configuration control over every page in your website. This ensures you can customize them to meet your business requirements. Carefully consider how to apply configurations systematically across your site’s information architecture. Always preview your page changes before moving them to production, and note that updated settings may take a few seconds to propagate after saving.

Next, you’ll help Clarity add pages to their website.