Pages already know about menu order. A lot of themes list them that way in a page menu, so a drag on this screen often shows up without a custom query. The new part is nesting. You can change a page’s parent by dragging it under another page, and that save is immediate too.
Open Reorder under Pages
- Go to Pages → Reorder
- Top-level pages are the rows you see first
- A page with children has an arrow. Click it to expand or collapse that branch
Same rule as posts: published pages only, no Save button, drag the handle.
Change order and parent
- Drag up or down to change the order among siblings
- Drag to the right, under another page, to make it a child of that page
- Drag left to bring it back up a level
I check the result in Pages → All Pages. WordPress shows the parent there, and the Order column matches the position you dragged. On the front, a menu you built by hand in Appearance → Menus does not follow this. That menu has its own order. A list that uses wp_list_pages(), or a theme that sorts pages by menu order, will follow the drag.
Limits worth knowing now
- The screen loads up to 100 child pages under one parent. Past that, the extras are not in the tree
- A site with 1,000 or more published pages shows a warning. You can still drag, and I would not. See Reorder a long list
- Drafts stay off this screen until you publish them
Custom post types that are hierarchical, like a course outline, use this same nesting. Reorder a custom post type is how you turn that screen on.