Documentation

WordPress & Website Glossary

Technical terms can be confusing. Many common, everyday words can have their own specialized meanings when used within the context of a WordPress website, or with the Internet in general, while acronyms and abbreviations can sound like alphabet soup.

The following glossary aims to demystify these terms of art, and get you more comfortable when talking about WordPress and the web.

WordPress

Basic Terminology

WordPress:
The world’s most popular content management system (CMS), powering 40% of the world’s websites.
WordPress.com:
The hosted version of WordPress for which a website owner can use as a SaaS with a variety of plan options.
WordPress.org:
The self-hosted WordPress software, available for free download and use.

Data Types, Classifications, and Content

Post Type:
The highest-level classification of content on a WordPress website. WordPress comes with two default post types: posts for time-sensitive content such as blog articles and pages for more evergreen content such as an “About” page. Additionally, custom post types (CPT) can be created for other types of content, depending on the needs of the website. Common CPTs can include: team members, case studies, and events, but the possibilities are unlimited. Even when content is not intended to be viewed in isolation, such as a testimonial, it is often easiest to manage it as a custom post type.
Post:
Any piece of content on the website, whether or not it is part of the “Post” post type. While we often refer to other pieces of content from various post types by the post type name (e.g., Pages, Team Members, Events, etc.), in WordPress parlance, nearly every piece of content is fundamentally a “Post” and stored in the “posts” table in the database.
Taxonomy:
Classifications of content within a post type. WordPress comes with two default taxonomies applied to the “post” post type: categories for broader, more structured, and potentially nested classification; and tags for more free-form but flat classification. As with post types, custom taxonomies can be created for a WordPress website and can be shared across post types to enable cross-referencing between post types.
Meta Content (Custom Field):
Beyond the taxonomy and content editor, specialized content that further characterizes a post type. For example: a job title and contact information for a team member. Plugins such as Advanced Custom Fields are often employed to fully leverage meta content and facilitate its use.
Media Library:
The area in the WordPress site administration that serves as a repository for the website’s assets such as images and PDF documents.
An image that is representative of a post. Depending on how a template is coded, this image could appear in a place of prominence on the post, and is likely also going to be used in other contexts such as a listing of posts on an archive page or in social media posts.
Front Page versus Home Page:
WordPress distinguishes between a static page that is used for the initial landing page of a website—called a “front page”—and a template that is a collection of recent posts—called a “home page”. This can be confusing to many non-developers, as the initial landing page of a website is commonly referred to as “home” or the “home page”, but as many if not most custom WordPress websites use a static page as its initial landing page, it’s more accurate to refer to it as the front page. While this makes no outward difference to visitors to the website, the nomenclature of the template files used to drive these distinct types of pages relies on this distinction.

WordPress Development Concepts

The Loop:
The programming mechanism that WordPress uses to display content on a page, be it a list of posts on an archive page, or the post content on a single article page.
Hooks:
A software feature of WordPress that allows for custom functionality via plugins and themes. Hooks are categorized as either actions—which execute at different points in the rendering of a web page—or filters—which modify data while it is being processed before reaching the browser.
Template:
Code that drives the display of content on a web page. When developing WordPress websites, it’s often more useful to think in terms of how many templates a website will need, rather than how many pages, since a single template often drives multiple web pages.
Slug:
A machine-readable version of a post or term name in a way that can be represented in a URL. Most WordPress slugs consist of lower-case letters, numbers, and dashes.
The URL displayed in the web browser’s location bar (after the domain information). The permalink structure can be customized to the website’s needs, and is converted by WordPress into the relevant values needed to display the proper content on the requested page.

Extending WordPress

Plugin:
Third-party pieces of software that expand on WordPress’ native functionality. Plugins can be free or premium (subject to an annual cost), and can provide all sorts of custom functionality.
Must-Use Plugin:
A special kind of plugin that cannot be deactivated. These plugins are stored in a separate directory and contain essential functionality specific to the website or the web hosting provider.
Child Theme:
A theme that requires and inherits significant styling and functionality from another theme, referred to as the “parent”. Even though only one theme can be active at a time, a child theme needs its parent theme to be installed in order to function properly.
Default Theme:
A theme written by the WordPress development team and distributed with the WordPress core software. Since 2010, these themes have been named after the year of their release (e.g., “Twenty Twenty-Four”), with an average of one new default theme per year. These themes often highlight new features in WordPress, and are useful as a debugging tool if a website is experiencing problems with a custom or other non-default WordPress theme.
WP-CLI:
A way of performing certain WordPress tasks via a command-line interface. Because command-line functions can be scripted, WP-CLI is useful for automating various tasks without having to access the WordPress administration via a web browser.

Content Editing Interfaces

Classic Editor:
The “traditional” means of writing content in WordPress, still in wide use. The standard classic editor interface consists of one large WYSIWYG entry box, but a number of different plugins can provide enhanced interfaces built on top of the classic editor.
Block Editor:
The current default means of entering content in WordPress. Content is added as blocks in a post.
Full Site Editing:
The new paradigm for editing WordPress websites in a way that every piece of content—including elements such as navigation menus—is edited as its own block.
Page Builders:
Special plugins (or sometimes, themes) that create their own content editing experiences, often in conjunction with the Classic Editor interface. Beaver Builder, WPBakery Page Builder, Elementor, and Divi are popular examples of this type of tool. Created to provide a make content authoring more “what you see is what you get”, these tools have the downsides of sometimes complicating the process of creating a truly responsive web page and tend to lock you into their system, making it difficult to switch to another tool later on.

WordPress Administration

Dashboard:
The “home page” of the administration section.
User:
A person with an account in the WordPress administration.
Role:
A classification of users defining the permissions they have on the system.
Administrator:
Has complete access to the website administration, including plugin and theme activation, editing and publishing of content, and all website settings.
Editor:
Has complete access to content creation, publication, and editing, even of other users’ content.
Author:
The account user who has written a particular post. In common WordPress installations, the Author role can create and edit their own content, but cannot publish their own content, nor can they edit other users’ content.

Internet & Technology

Internet Protocols

Protocol:
For websites and web pages, the “http://” or “https://” that comes before the domain name. “https://” indicates a secure (encrypted) site, and is the current standard for serving websites.
Domain Name:
A name you can assign to your website or other Internet services such as email. Most websites respond to a bare domain (such as example.com) as well as its www subdomain (www.example.com). Today, the www. subdomain has become largely superfluous.
Top-Level Domain:
The last bit of a domain after the last dot. “.com” and “.org” are the two most common top-level domains in the United States, but a multitude of top-level domains are available that serve specialized purposes, subject matters, countries, or populations.
Subdomain:
Any variation of a domain other than the domain itself plus its top-level domain. In addition to the “www” subdomain, common ones can be used for email, FTP, and other services. More complex ones are often used to point to other domains on the Internet as a means of verifying domain ownership.
Registrar:
The service where you pay for your domain name. Domains are often renewed annually, but can be renewed for up to ten years at a time (depending on the registrar and/or the top-level domain).
IP (Internet Protocol) Address:
A numeric or alphanumeric value that equates to a website URL or other Internet service.
Name Server:
A service that ties domains and subdomains to their appropriate IP addresses. Every domain has one primary name server where this information is stored, and computers around the Internet use it as the canonical repository of that information for that domain. Your domain’s name server will often be the same provider as your registrar, although it does not have to be.
DNS (Domain Name System) Record:
An entry in the domain name’s name server that tells computers around the world how to convert a domain name into an IP address. See Demystifying DNS for more details on how DNS works.
URL (Uniform Resource Locator):
The full text entered into a web browser’s location bar to find a particular page on the web, including the protocol, subdomain (if any), domain name, and (in the case of WordPress) permalink.

Technology Stack and Programming Languages

Back-End Code:
Code that is executed on the server, before data is sent to the browser. For WordPress, back end code is written in PHP.
PHP (PHP Hypertext Processor):
The coding language that pulls content from the database and converts it into information to be displayed on the web browser.
Front-End Code:
Code that is sent to and executed by the browser. The three main front-end languages used on the web are HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
HTML (Hypertext Markup Language):
The coding language that controls the structure of a web page as interpreted by the web browser.
JavaScript:
The coding language that creates front-end functionality on the website, including asynchronous content rendering and interface enhancements.
CSS (Cascading Style Sheets):
The coding language that dictates the styling of a web page, including layout, colors, typography, etc.
Database:
The system on the web server that stores the content. WordPress stores its content in a number of database tables that cross-reference each other to put together the content that displays on a web page.
MySQL:
The popular relational database management system used by WordPress.

Website Hosting

Hosted:
Any website installation that acts like software as a service (Saas) where the website owner signs up with a provider and the provider is responsible for the maintenance of the software. Hosted solutions usually offer canned solutions, and it can be more difficult to customize to a website owner’s exact needs.
Self-Hosted:
Any website installation for which the website is responsible for managing the web hosting provider and keeping the software for their website up-to-date. Self-hosted solutions offer greater flexibility and options for customization.
Web Host:
The provider that supplies a home for a self-hosted website on the Internet.

Internet Tools and Systems

Content Management System (CMS):
Any software that facilitates the content creation for a website by allowing authoring in an administration area instead of directly through code.
Production Website:
The live website a visitor to your organization sees when they enter the website’s URL.
Staging Website:
A non-production copy of a website used for testing core, plugin, and theme updates and new website functionality. Other non-production website copies can be set up to try different features in a way that doesn’t block updates from eventually being pushed to the production website.
Backup:
A copy of the code, database, and media content to be stored in the case of a website failure.
Uptime:
The amount of time per month a website is online and reachable, usually expressed in terms of “9”s. For example, a “three-9s” uptime expectation means that the web hosting provider expects that the website will be up at least 99.9% of the month, or 43,156.8 minutes out of a 30-day month. These usually targets as opposed to guarantees; guarantees are normally only available in the highest-tier (most expensive) web hosting plans.

Security

Brute Force Attack:
A hacking attempt that involves a single entity (or multiple entities) repeatedly trying to break into a site using different username and password combinations. Brute force attacks are often automated, and often rely on historical tendencies of WordPress to use a default administration username and login URL.
Credential Stuffing Attack:
A hacking attempt that involves trying to break into a variety of websites using a compromised username and password combination. For example, a data breach on one service that reveals valid usernames and passwords on that service may be used by malicious actors to break into other services using those same credentials. For this reason, you should use unique username and password combinations on all of your Internet accounts, and manage those credentials via a secure password manager.
Web Application Firewall (WAF):
A service designed to intercept malicious traffic before such traffic reaches a website. WAF can be configured to allow or block traffic coming from particular IP addresses or countries, as well as a number of other criteria such as particular Internet-crawling bots.

Website Design

Page Structure

The section of a web page that appears at the top, usually throughout the entire website, and often contains the organization’s logo and website’s primary navigation menu.
The section of a web page that appears at the bottom, usually throughout the entire website, and often contains supplemental information such as a secondary navigation menu, copyright information, social media links, etc.

Design Considerations

Responsive:
The ability of a website’s front-end styling to adjust automatically to the size of the visitor’s device’s viewport without requiring a separate “mobile-only” version of the website.
Accessibility (a11y):
The process of making a website compatible with a variety of assistive tools, including but not limited to: screen readers for the visually-impaired, keyboard-only navigation for persons with fine-motor control impairments, proper use of color and contrast for persons with different types of color blindness, etc. The current wide-adopted standard is known as WCAG 2.2 AA, but other standards exist depending on the requirements of the website. For government and government-affiliated websites, the legal standard is known as Section 508, and closely mirrors the WCAG standard. Today, most company websites must meet a basic level of accessibility in order to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).
Internationalization (i14n):
The process of making a website compatible with reaching an international audience, mostly in terms of translation into different human languages.
Localization (l10n):
The process of applying internationalization to a website for a particular country or region.