WordPress Terminologies for Beginners

Starting out with WordPress is not as difficult as you may think IF you know your basics. Of course, it is not a slice of pie either. However, one thing that will keep you light years ahead is if you learn the WordPress lingo, fast.  So today, we would be discussing some of the WordPress terminologies for beginners

1. Theme: Located in the Appearance section of your dashboard, also known as templates, this determines the layout and style of your site. It is responsible for the overall look (images, color, stylesheet et cetera) of your site. 

2. Widget: This refers to boxes that can be added to your website’s sidebar or footer area for a better user experience. This can be anything and can range from a countdown calendar, to a log in section, a clock, or any other thing you want displayed. 
3. Side Bar: This refers to a column at either side of your website, different from the main content area. The main purpose of a side bar is to display secondary information to help with user navigation. Or sometimes, ads and other contents. Similarly, this could be in the footer section of a website too.
4. Dashboard: Think of this like the control area. The WordPress Dashboard, also known as the WP admin, or Panel, this is the primary control system of your entire site. It presents an overview of all the functions, settings and plug-ins available on your WordPress site. 

5. Plugin: These refer to the different software users to alter and/or extend the functionality of your WordPress site. For example, the Woo commerce plugin allows you to turn your website into a shop, the Yoast SEO plugin helps to optimize your site for visibility, the Gravatar plugin helps you add any type of form on your site. These plug-ins and more allow you to add any kind of functionality to your site.  

6. Featured Image: In WordPress, this refers to the major image for a blog post. Its entire purpose is to visually represent the mood or theme of a page, or blog post.  You can choose to add this to the top of your post, or not. When you add a featured image, and you share the post to other social media platforms, the featured image gives your post a visual appeal, thereby increasing click rate. 

7. Tag: Think of this as your king or short term keyword that if used properly, helps improve your visibility in search engines.  Similarly, WordPress Tags exist so that you can group your similar or recurring posts underneath a category. That way, you can improve user experience, and get better organized. 

8. Navigation Bar/Menu: In WordPress, this refers to a customizable menu, where you can highlight the most important pages on your site for a better user experience. Often, this is located as a horizontal bar of links on the top page (using a computer) and as a hamburger menu (using a mobile)

9. Header and Footer: Simply put, a WordPress Header is an element at the top of every single page on the website consisting of the logo, links, and perhaps a search bar. On the other hand, a WordPress Footer is found at the bottom of every page which you can find after the main content section. A footer is primarily used to share contact information and social media handles. 

10. Domain Name: A domain name is simply the layman’s term for a website’s address. It is what you input into a search engine to search for your site. For instance, the domain name for this site is www.gbefunwa.com. 

11. Hosting: In simple terms, this refers to a store (a website or other data) on a server that can be accessed over the internet, and can extend access to other external websites. There are four types of Hosting. We have the, Shared Hosting, Managed Hosting, WordPress Hosting, VPS Hosting, Dedicated Hosting, Cloud Hosting.

12. .ORG:  Differentiating between WordPress.org and WordPress.com. A WordPress.org site is a self-hosted WordPress site; that is, you download the WordPress software, from the mother source. Afterwards, you can then build the website and maintain it on your own. 

13. .COM: On the other hand, WordPress.com is more of a hosted blogging service on WordPress Software; a managed host. It is not as independent of WordPress as a .org site would be,

14.  Settings: The Settings area of your WordPress, located at the bottom left panel of your dashboard functions as an all in one location for the tools that are needed to define, customize and control the six major sections of your website. 

15. Page: A Page in a WordPress site refers to sections that have static content only. These contents do not have to be updated often or shared on social media, they provide information about your business and site. Take for instance an “About Us” page, or a “Contact Us” page. Similarly, pages are organized as child and parent pages, unlike posts that are organized with Tags and Categories. 

16. Posts: A post on a WordPress website refers to every entry that cannot be classified as a page. They are entries like blogs, media, or documents uploaded to your website and filed as categories, filed with tags, et al.

17. Users: A WordPress user is someone who can login to your WordPress website, with a user name and a password, to fulfill certain roles that you, the registered user, has assigned to them. In this case, the registered user is the owner of the website. However,  anyone else who can access the dashboard, is merely a user. 

18. Tools: This refers to a menu tab in the WordPress admin sidebar. It comprises sunroofs that are used to manage your website and ensure functionality.  

19. WordPress Edit Profile Page: This refers to the section that is accessible to the user, primarily, for the purpose of adding a personalized profile. While it is accessible to every user on the site, some features exist only for the registered user. 

20. Comments: communication is a two way street. Even on websites or on blogs. The comments section of WordPress enables your liners or readers to air out their views over a piece of content you uploaded. As the admin of a website, you can always hide comments, turn off commenting, or install plug-ins like Akismet to prevent and hide spam comments. 

21. Categories: Located underneath the posts section of your dashboard, the categories section refers to a grouping system that you, a user, can employ to add structure to your site. Take, for instance, you run a  lifestyle, cooking, and wellness blog. With the categories section, you can sort posts based on similarities, to help improve your user experience, and of course SEO

22. SEO: Shorten form of Search Engine Optimization, this is the process of ensuring that your website and its content are visible in search engines and rank higher on search engines. This ensures organic traffic in your site, generate leads and can drive conversions to your products or services. Best SEO practices involve  appropriate keywords, a fast page load time, as well as SEO tools like YoastSEO, Ahrefs and RankMath SEO among others.

23. Open Source: If a project is said to be open source, this means that the source code of the project is publicly available, and can be studied, modified and shared by third parties to the project. WordPress is an open source project, and as such, independent projects and software have been made on, and are being made on WordPress. This is one of the core things that fosters the existence of a WordPress community. 

24. Slider: A slider is a section of a WordPresss site that displays media in either picture or video format. Think of it as a visual slide show. Often, this is used to display visual information as it tallies to brand, business or service, and the slide show could either be automatic or, require human input.

So, there you have it. From terminologies in WordPress content, to the structure and features, we have put together a list of WordPress terminologies for beginners like you. Hopefully, this helps ease out your WordPress journey!