WordPress Glossary
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One of the first challenges you might face when setting up a site is understanding the terminology. Our WordPress glossary helps explain WordPress and blogging terminology in simple words. Read on for a glossary of commonly used WordPress terms and expressions – explained in plain English.
Common Terms:
Absolute Path
An absolute path refers to the complete details needed to locate a file or folder, starting from the root element and ending with the other subdirectories. Absolute paths are used in websites and operating systems for locating files and folders. An absolute path is also known as an absolute pathname or full path. For example, the absolute path of this page, is https://computer-tutors.co.uk/wordpress-glossary/, because it will point to the same page (this one) regardless of the location of the file or folder in which it is written.
Action
A PHP function that is executed at specific points throughout the system.
Admin Area
The area of the website that can only be accessed by logging into WordPress, from which content is created, modified or removed and settings changed.
Admin Bar
(see toolbar)
Administrator
The highest-level user role within WordPress. Administrators have unrestricted access to the WordPress Admin Area.
Apache
Apache is a web server application that serves over 55% of all active websites – making it the most commonly used web server application of its kind on the internet. Apache is also widely regarded as the best server application for publishing WordPress-powered websites.
Attachment
An attachment is the term used to refer to any media (images, video, etc) used within a post or page.
Atom
A specific type of format, similar to RSS, used for syndicating content on blogs and news-like sites, viewable by Atom-aware programs called news readers or aggregators.
Autosave
Autosave is the act of automatically saving your content as you create it. WordPress autosaves your content as you create/write it, performing an autosave every couple of minutes. You can see when WordPress last performed an autosave by looking in the lower right corner of the editor, where a notification of when the entry was last saved to the database is displayed.
Avatar
The small icon, photograph or graphical representation of a user that appears next to that user’s name or comments.
Back End
Another term for the ‘Admin Area‘.
Backlink
An incoming link from a different website to yours. Read more about the importance of backlinks on Wikipedia.
Blog
A discussion or informational website consisting of a series of discrete entries (commonly referred to as ‘posts‘ or ‘articles’) – typically displayed such that the most recent entries appear first.
Blogroll
A blogroll is a list of links to other blogs related to your own blog. It could include links to your other blog sites, or the blogs you like, or any websites you want users to checkout.
Category
A special type of predefined WordPress taxonomy used as the primary means of organizing and grouping (i.e. categorising) WordPress posts of a similar nature.
CDN
A CDN (Content Delivery Network) is a large distributed system of servers deployed in multiple data centre’s across the internet (usually in a variety of different countries) used to both reduce the load on any single server and serve content to end-users with increased speed, redundancy and performance.
Child Theme
A child theme is a WordPress theme that inherits the functionality of another theme, known as the parent theme. A child theme allows you to change small aspects of your site’s appearance yet still preserve your theme’s look and functionality. Ref: Developer.wordpress.org
Comments
A feature of weblogs that allows readers to respond to posts by leaving a comment, which, if approved by the author, will be displayed underneath the content of the blog post.
Content
The text, images, videos or other information contained within the website, typically within the website’s posts and pages.
Content Management System(CMS)
A content management system (CMS) is software that helps users create, manage, and modify content on a website without the need for technical skills. Some examples of content management systems are Wix, WordPress, Drupal, Squarespace, and Shopify.
Core
The main files that make up the WordPress software, excluding the plugins and theme files.
CMS
A CMS (Content Management System) is a system for creating and managing online content. Watch our handy video explanation for more information.
CSS
CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is a computer language used to express the presentation (layout, dimensions, colours, etc) of structured documents (usually written in HTML). Basically, CSS tells the browser how to display the content that makes up each webpage.
Dashboard
The main administration screen within the WordPress back end. This is the screen that appears after logging in and displays various information through special admin screen widgets that users can enable, disable and move around on the screen.
Database
Software used to manage and store information/data. WordPress uses a MySQL database management system for storing and retrieving various information, including the content of you blog and various settings and data used by both the WordPress core and plugins.
Default Theme
A theme that comes preinstalled with a new WordPress installation.
Dedicated Hosting
A web hosting service in which the user is assigned his or her own server that’s entirely dedicated to running their software and typically has full control over its settings.
Developer
Someone who actively creates/develops software (such as WordPress plugins). Often abbreviated to ‘dev’.
DIV
An HTML element generally used for generic organisational or stylistic applications.
DNS
The DNS (Domain Name System) is a naming system for resources that connect to the internet. The DNS translates domain names into the numerical IP addresses required for locating computer services, servers and devices worldwide.
Domain Name
The part of a network address that identifies it as belonging to a particular domain, e.g. ‘winningwp.com’. The unique address that identifies a website on the internet.
E-Commerce
E-commerce is the activity of electronically buying or selling products on online services or over the Internet.
Excerpt
A kind of summary or condensed description of a blog post that typically shows up (provided you’ve entered one) in search results, RSS feeds and anywhere in the theme that it’s been programmed to do so, such as on archive and category pages.
Featured Image
A specific image that the user can upload that becomes assigned to a specific post or page. This image will then appear in certain predefined positions that are chosen by the developer responsible for coding the particular theme currently in use.
Footer
The part of a website normally displayed at the bottom of the webpage.
FOSS
FOSS means Free and Open Source Software. This however does not mean that the software is free of cost. It means that the software’s source code is open for all and anyone is free to use, study and modify the code. This principle allows others to contribute to developing and improving a software like a community.
Founders Of WordPress
WordPress was released on May 27, 2003, by its founders, American developer Matt Mullenweg and English developer Mike Little. WordPress Foundation owns WordPress, WordPress projects, and other related trademarks. WordPress.com is a web building platform for self-publishing that is popular for blogging and other works. It is owned and operated by Automattic, Inc. It is run on a modified version of WordPress software. Matt Mullenweg project’s founder has used it to create a company worth $7.5 billion.
Framework
A framework (supporting structure) of code that can be thought of as sitting between the WordPress core and the main files that make up a basic theme. Frameworks aid in both updating and developing themes and often contain a vast amount of functionality that can be easily incorporated into the theme files by a skilled developer.
Front End
The part of the site that visitors who come to the site see and interact with – as opposed to the back end, which is only visible by those who login to your website.
FTP
FTP (File Transfer Protocol) is a standard network protocol used to transfer (i.e. upload and download) files between a computer and a server (or from one server to another). To access your WordPress files on a server, you’ll need an FTP client, such as Cyberduck (free), Transmit (premium) or Filezilla (free).
functions.php
A file located within a theme that contains a number of PHP functions that enable specific theme-functionality.
Genericons
A set of free, GPL, vector icons embedded in a web font (more on Genericons).
GPL
The GPL (General Public License) is a type of software license that gives end users (individuals, organizations, companies) freedoms to use, study, share (copy), and modify the software. Read more about the GPL on Wikipedia.
Gravatar
A globally recognized avatar that’s usually associated with a user’s email address, such that it may automatically appear wherever that user enters his/her email address (typically used in forums/commenting systems). For more info check out gravatar.com.
Header
The part of a website normally displayed at the top of the webpage.
Hosting
A type of hosting service that provides users with their own space on a server connected to the internet, from which to serve files (which may, for example, take the form of a website) to users who can access/view them through specialised software, such as web browsers. The service that provides server space for a website to be accessible on the internet.
.htaccess
A hidden file (meaning it is not normally visible through standard FTP client settings) used primarily to configure certain Apache web server software for the directory in which it resides.
HTML
HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is the main computer language for creating web pages (and other information) that can be displayed in a web browser.
IP Address
An IP (Internet Protocol) address is a numerical label assigned to computers, printers, and mobile devices, etc, that connect to the internet through a network that uses the Internet Protocol to communicate.
JavaScript
A commonly used computer language that allows client-side scripts to interact with the user, control the browser and alter the content displayed through the browser.
Keyword Difficulty(KD)
Keyword Difficulty (KD) is an SEO metric that estimates how hard it would be to rank on the first page of Google for a given keyword. It is measured on a scale from 0 to 100, with the latter being the hardest to rank for.
LAMP
An abbreviation of ‘Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP‘, LAMP is a software bundle composed entirely of free and open-source software, suitable for building high-performance dynamic web sites.
Linux
A free and open-source computer operating system that is particularly popular in web server and other high-performance computing environments.
Localhost
Localhost basically just means ‘this computer’. It is a name that the computer’s software can use to access the computer’s network services.
Loop
Also known as the ‘WordPress loop’, the loop is a section of PHP code used to display WordPress posts.
Managed Hosting
Managed hosting is a relatively new concept (largely popularised by the current leaders in the managed WordPress-hosting field: WP Engine is aimed at taking the hassle out of managing the technicalities of your own server.
MAMP
(see LAMP)
Media
In WordPress circles, media usually refers to forms of content other than text, such as images and video.
Meta
The term meta refers to a concept that is an abstraction from another concept, used to complete or add to the latter. In WordPress, meta refers to administrative-type data contained in HTML tags (often read by search engines) that aid in describing and/or defining what the web page is about.
Multisite
A WordPress feature that allows multiple WordPress sites to share a single WordPress installation. Read more about how to use to create a network of sites in the official WordPress codex.
MySQL
The world’s second most widely used open-source relational database management system.
Noindex Tag
A meta tag that tells search engines not to index a specific webpage in its index.
Open Source
Free and open-source software (FOSS) allows users and programmers to edit, modify or reuse the software’s source code. This is in contrast to proprietary software, where the software is under restrictive copyright licensing and the source code is usually hidden from the users. WordPress is open-source software.
Page
A single web page with its own unique URL. WordPress pages tend to be used for content that does not change – such as information about the company/website.
Parent Theme
A parent theme is a complete theme which includes all of the required WordPress template files and assets for the theme to work. All themes excluding child themes are considered parent themes.
Permalinks
An unchanging, single URL specifically allocated to a specific web resource (i.e. a page, post, etc) that will continue to point to that same resource indefinitely.
PHP
PHP is a popular server-side scripting language designed specifically for integration with HTML. WordPress is written using PHP and requires it for operation (Wikipedia).
Php. school
Open Source Learning for PHP. A revolutionary new way to learn PHP.
phpMyAdmin
A free and open source tool written in PHP intended to handle the administration of a mySQL database through a web browser.
Ping
The Ping tool is used to test whether a particular host is reachable across an IP network. A Ping measures the time it takes for packets to be sent from the local host to a destination computer and back. The Ping tool measures and records the round-trip time of the packet and any losses along the way. (see pong)
Pingback
A system that allows a blogger to see who has seen the original post and has written their own entry concerning it – provided both authors have pingback-enabled websites (note: pingbacks can be enabled via the ‘Discussion Settings’ within WordPress).
Plugin
One or more files containing PHP code that extends the functionality of a standard WordPress installation.
Pong
(see ping)
Post
Content that has been written and published to a blog.
Post Formats
A specific piece of meta-information contained within certain themes that can be used to customize the presentation of a blog post. Read more about post formats in the official WordPress codex.
Post Types
The types of structured data and maintained in the WordPress posts table. Read more about post types in the official WordPress codex.
Post Status
The current status of certain content within WordPress, such as posts and pages; available statuses include ‘published’ (viewable by everyone), ‘draft’ (incomplete post viewable only by logged-in users above a certain user level), or ‘private’ (viewable only to logged in WordPress users at the administrator level).
Qualified traffic
Qualified traffic refers to website visitors who are highly relevant and likely to convert into customers or take desired actions on the website.
Responsive
Websites that have been designed to provide an optimal viewing experience on any size screen/device.
Robots.txt
A text file aimed at passing on certain data to the web crawlers and web robots used by search engines to read websites and web pages.
Role
A designation of WordPress user that determines the level of access a user has to the website. Read more about WordPress roles in the official WordPress codex.
RSS
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content – such as blog posts.
Security Keys
A WordPress security device is placed within the site’s wp-config.php file. Read more about security keys in the official WordPress codex.
SEO
SEO (Search engine optimisation) is the process of affecting the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine’s organic (unpaid) search results. Learn more about SEO on Wikipedia.
Server
A computer that is connected to the internet (usually permanently) for the purpose of hosting single or multiple websites.
SFTP
A more secure version of FTP.
Shared Hosting
A popular and relatively cheap web hosting service whereby a user’s website is placed on the same server as those of multiple other users. Read more about shared hosting on our Beginner’s Guide to Choosing the Best WordPress Hosting.
Shortcodes
Special tags (short bits of code) that allow users to quickly and easily pull bits of predefined functionality into their content.
Sidebar
The vertical section of a website is normally displayed to either the left or right of the main content.
Sitemap
A sitemap, the file that lists all the URLs on your website, is an integral part of your site design and search engine optimisation (SEO) process. A sitemap is important and crucial to your PageRank because it tells Googlebot and other search engine bots where to start and where to go next when they crawl your pages.
Slug
A WordPress slug is usually an automatically generated (although they can be easily edited) URL-friendly version of the post or page title – an ideal slug is usually a few words that best describe a page or post.
Spam
Any form of obtrusive, unsolicited and unwelcome advertising sent out en masse.
Tag
A special type of predefined WordPress taxonomy used as a second (the first being WordPress categories) or alternative means of organizing and grouping WordPress posts. Unlike categories, the use of tags is entirely optional.
Tagline
A short (often catchy) phrase that usually resides under the main title or logo of a blog – usually used to try and convey the character/meaning of the website in only a few concise words.
Taxonomy
In WordPress, a taxonomy is a subclass used to classify WordPress posts. WordPress has two predefined taxonomies: categories and tags – although it also allows for the creation of, user-defined, custom taxonomies.
Template
A file used by the theme to define either a complete page or part of a page, such as the header, the sidebar or the footer.
Text Editor
Software used to edit text files in plain text format, as opposed to binary format (which is the format used by word processing programs, such as Microsoft Word). There are many excellent text editors available, such as TextWrangler (free), BBEdit (premium), TextMate (premium), Notepad++ (free) and Sublime Text 2 (premium).
Theme
A set of files used to define both the look and feel of a WordPress website without modifying any of the underlying WordPress core files, i.e. the theme essentially sits above or on top of the WordPress core files, tapping into their functionality to display both the front end of the website and often, although not always, certain theme-specific-functionality within the back end.
Toolbar
The horizontal (black) bar that appears at the top of a WordPress site for logged-in users and contains a number of useful administration screen links.
Trackback
An alert that notifies an original author of a blog post that someone else has written an entry concerning their post.
URL
The term URL (or ‘uniform resource locator’) refers to the web address of a specific location/resource on the internet – which, in most cases, is displayed within the browser’s address bar.
Visual Editor
The default editor is used in the creation of new content within WordPress.
VPS Hosting
A web hosting service in which users are allocated their own partition on a server with a predefined amount of memory and computational power reserved specifically for that user.
WAMP
(see LAMP)
Web Spam
Web Spam comes in many forms, they are techniques used by some site owners to try and cheat their way to the top of the search engine results. (Ref : Spam policies for Google web search )
Widgets
A WordPress widget is a modular element that enables you to add a specific feature to your website. Widgets can be added to different areas of a website, such as a website’s sidebars or footer areas, and they’re an inherent part of WordPress’ design and layout customisations. A self-contained area of a WordPress webpage (typically within either the sidebar or the footer) that performs a specific function, such as displaying a calendar or a list of recent posts. The WordPress community has created thousands of new WordPress widgets, many of which can be added via plugins.
2. Simple Social Icons
3. WP Call Button
4. Google Maps Widget
5. OptinMonster
7. Easy Table of Contents
8. Google Language Translator
9. The Events Calendar
10. Relevanssi
WooCommerce
WooCommerce was created by WooThemes, a WordPress theme and plugin company. However, in 2015, WooThemes was acquired by Automattic. WooCommerce is free to use and by far the most popular eCommerce plugin for WordPress. According to Barn2, there are now over 1,453 plugins with ‘WooCommerce’ in the title, with the CodeCanyon marketplace selling 1,477 WooCommerce plugins. WooCommerce.com sells over 800 official WooCommerce plugin extensions.
WordCamp
The name is given to all formal WordPress-related conferences – in which people come together primarily to learn more about WordPress and associate with other like-minded people (i.e. people working with or in relation to WordPress). Visit the official WordCamp website to learn more and find out if there’s a WordCamp near you!
WordPress.org
WordPress.org, often called self-hosted WordPress, is the free, open-source WordPress software that you can install on your own web host to create a website. Free and open-source software (FOSS) allows users and programmers to edit, modify or reuse the software’s source code. WordPress is a web content management system. It was originally created as a tool to publish blogs but evolved to support publishing other web content, including more traditional websites, mailing lists and internet forums, media galleries, membership sites, learning management systems and online stores.
WordPress.com
WordPress.com is a for-profit, paid service that is powered by the WordPress.org software.
wp-config.php
One of the most important files within the WordPress core, the wp-config.php file contains various essential information, such as database connectivity settings and WordPress security keys.
XHTML
XHTML (Extensible HyperText Markup Language) is essentially a stricter subset of HTML, originally developed to make HTML more extensible and increase interoperability with other data formats. Read more about XHTML on Wikipedia.
Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO is a popular WordPress plugin designed to help website managers optimise their WordPress sites for search engines. Yoast SEO plugin helps your site perform better in search engines with a variety of features. It takes care of the technical aspects of SEO.
Zombie Pages
Zombie pages are the pages on your website that generate little to no traffic.
