WordPress Glossary: Basic WordPress Terms You Need to Know in 2023

WordPress Glossary: A Comprehensive Guide to WordPress Terms and Definitions

WordPress glossary for beginners is an essential resource for anyone starting to use the popular content management system. It provides definitions for all the technical and jargon-filled words and phrases associated with WordPress. With this glossary, you can easily understand everything from the WordPress Codex to plugins and themes. Whether you're a newbie or an experienced WordPress user, this glossary will help you navigate the WordPress world with ease. Get started today and unlock the power of WordPress!

A

Absolute Path

In WordPress, an absolute path refers to the full, complete file path that points to a specific file or directory on a server. It starts from the root directory of the file system and includes the entire directory structure leading up to th...

Admin Area

Admin page is the one where the owner of the blog (and the team who has the admin access/edit access) can login to the backend of the website and make required changes, approve posts/comments/content, modify the website etc. It can be ac...

Atom

Sitemap can be in any format XML, RSS and Atom feed The main difference between these is that the XML Sitemap submits the details of the URL of all the pages and posts of your website to the Google webmaster. Whereas the RSS / Atom feed...

Author

In WordPress, an author refers to a user who has the capability to write and publish posts on a website. An author is a user role in WordPress, which has a set of capabilities that determine what actions the user can perform on the website....

Autosave

Autosave is a feature in WordPress that automatically saves a draft of your post or page as you work on it. This feature is intended to help prevent data loss in case of technical issues or unexpected events, such as a power outage or brows...

c

CDN

CDN is short for Content Delivery Network. As the name suggests, it is used to provide the content, content in the case of WordPress is the images, static files, scripts that load over a network. CDN helps to provide the content faster to a...

Child Theme

A child theme in WordPress is a theme that inherits the functionality and styling of another theme, called the parent theme. It allows you to make changes to the design and functionality of a website without modifying the parent theme'...

CMS

As the name of CMS suggests, it is a Content Management System. CMS Admin gives full facility to the owner to manage his website. After the website is created, you can login and access any function, meaning you can change the text of a part...

cPanel

cPanel is a control panel that helps you to manage your web hosting server using a web-based interface. cPanel allows us to publish websites, manage domains, organize web files, databases, create email accounts, and much more.

Customizer

WordPress Customizer is a built-in tool in WordPress that allows users to customize various aspects of their WordPress site, such as the site's layout, color scheme, and widgets, among other things. It is accessible from the WordPress...

D

Database

A database is a collection of records storing data in tables. Each table contains multiple rows of records having a fixed number of columns. A database has multiple tables, and each table has multiple records. Examples are user table, posts...

E

Excerpt

If you noticed, WordPress shows full posts by default on your home page, blog page, and auto generated archive pages such as category, tag pages. What's wrong with full posts? Well, it may make your site slow or you may get penalised by...

F

FTP

FTP (File Transfer Protocol) is a standard network protocol. It is the exchange of data files between the server and the client on the Internet and in the local network. FTP is completely based on client server architecture, which is to be...

Functions.php

In WordPress, the functions.php file is a theme-specific file that allows you to add custom code and functions to your WordPress site. It is located in the root directory of your WordPress theme and can be used to add features and functiona...

J

JavaScript

JavaScript is a dynamic computer programming language. It is an Interpreted/Oriented Language. JavaScript is also known as client side/server side script. With the help of which a dynamic web page is created. This web technology standard is...

L

Loop

A loop in WordPress is a programming construct used to display a series of posts or other content on a WordPress site. The loop retrieves data from the WordPress database and outputs it in the desired format, such as a list of blog posts, a...

M

Metadata

Metadata is data about data. In other words, it is information that is used to describe the data contained in something such as a web page, document or file. Another way to think of metadata is as a brief explanation or summary of what the...

Multisite Network

A multisite network in WordPress is a feature that allows users to create and manage multiple websites from a single installation of WordPress. Each website in the network is called a "site" and shares the same WordPress installation and da...

MySQL

MySQL is a database management system that is used by WordPress to store and retrieve data. WordPress is built on a PHP and MySQL platform, which means that it uses PHP scripts to interact with a MySQL database to store and retrieve informa...

N

Nonce

Nonce are Number only used once which is used when there is a secure operation need to be done. Nonces are valid for short period of time and expire, they can be only used once. Nonces are used in cases like when we authorize some servic...

P

Parent Theme

If the duplicate version of an original theme is a child theme, then the original theme is called a parent theme. Most of the Genesis frameworks use it, for which it is one of the popular themes. WordPress is an open source project on wh...

Permalink

As you know that when we do a search on the Internet about any topic, the result or the page of the article related to it remains connected to a path ie url or link of a website. That link or URL is called permalink.To rank any post in the...

PHP

PHP is an acronym for "PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor". It is a widely-used, open-source scripting language. PHP scripts are executed on the server. It is free to download and use. PHP is an amazing and popular language. It is powerful enough...

phpMyAdmin

Wordpress uses DB to store website data like users, posts, and more in SQL based DB like Mysql, postgreSql. To help non developers easily manage database an open source tool PhpMyadmin is used, which is a GUI based database management tool....

Pingback

A backlink is called as a pingback in WordPress language. It can be any of the below: A backlink you receive from an external site to your content or  An internal link, you have created to your own posts. In either case, you/owner of the b...

Plugin

WordPress plugins are software applications that allow you to extend the functionality and features of your WordPress website. In the same way that applications work on your smartphone, websites work on computers. It is possible to obtai...

S

Shortcodes

Let say we installed a plugin, and want to use in sidebar. So one way is to add code for same, but not all can do. Instead there is a short code, which internally contains the code. So, instead of writing the whole code, we add a short code...

SSL

SSL Certificates is a digital certificate. Which you can buy from any organization or on your own. This creates a secure connection between your web browser and your web server. This certificate includes the certificate holder's na...

T

Tags

To classify the content and separate for easier structuring, we require some taxonomies like jacket and t-shirt both are clothes but different category. More further the jacket can be normal wear or party wear. So, the "jacket" and "t-shir...

Taxonomy

In WordPress, a taxonomy is a way of grouping content together based on common characteristics. WordPress comes with a number of built-in taxonomies, including categories and tags. Categories are used to group related posts together in a...

Template

The template is of multiple types for WordPress as the template is basically a piece of code or design including HTML/PHP/js code. There can be1. Code Templated - A theme template file for the posting page, archive page, etc with UI only2....

Theme

WordPress Theme is a User Friendly Framework for your Blog or Website. By which the Visual Appearance of your site can be customized. In simple language, how your site will look from Front, its entire management is done by Theme key. But...

Theme Editor

Theme editor is a simple text editor in WordPress located at Appearance » Editor. It allows us to modify WordPress theme files from the admin area. ... It is important to note that if we don't know how to code, then we should NOT be us...

Two Factor Authentication

Two-factor authentication (2FA) is a security process in which a user provides two different authentication factors to verify their identity. This helps to ensure that the user is who they claim to be, and that the login request is legitima...

W

Widgets

A widget in WordPress is a small block of content or functionality that can be added to specific areas of a WordPress theme, such as the sidebar, header, or footer. Widgets provide a way to add dynamic content to a website without the need...

Wp-config.php

wp-config. php is the core WordPress files. It contains information about the database, including the name, host, username, and password. This information allows WordPress to communicate with the database to store and retrieve data (e.g. Po...

WYSIWYG

WYSIWYG is short for What you see is What you get means you will see whatever you writing exactly as it will appear to everyone. This refers to the editor for writing posts on the blog. If we talk about WordPress, it has two editor option...

X

XML

XML is an Extensible markup language and used mostly for keeping configurations of sites/software as it is - easier to write - easy to read - common language - better for documentations/configsIt can be used to backup/restore configur...