The WordPress Dictionary
Last Updated on January 16, 2021
A Glossary Of WordPress Terms
In this post, I’m going to be going over the basic terms that you need to know to build your website or blog on WordPress. I call this post, the WordPress dictionary. WordPress is great because it’s easy to use, even for the non-techy. Another great thing about WordPress is you don’t have to know any code to edit your own website or blog.
You do have to know how to use WordPress, and a big part of that is knowing the lingo to make things easier. WordPress has its own set of vocabulary words, and I highly recommend you learn these before you start trying to build your WordPress site.
This post the WordPress dictionary is a great starting point before you jump into WordPress tutorials. WordPress can be tricky to use at first if you don’t know how to use it.
Keep in mind these are the basics. I’ll be writing a post on more advanced glossary terms shortly.
Pin Image To Pinterest
WordPress Dictionary
DASHBOARD
Let’s start with the WordPress dashboard. The dashboard is going to be the first thing that you see every time you log into your website or blog to make edits. The dashboard is going to display an overview of your website or blog in the center of the screen and you a menu that you will see on the left-hand side. Since this post isn’t dedicated to the WordPress dashboard, I’m not going to go into much detail regarding the dashboard but will be posting on this very soon. The important thing to know about the dashboard is that it is going to be your starting point to make edits to your website or blog. For example, editing pages, adding blog posts, managing plugins, etc.
TOOLBAR
The next thing I want to cover is the toolbar. The toolbar displays links to the most commonly used WordPress features. Once you log into your website, you are going to see it at the top of your dashboard. If you preview or visit your site and you are still logged in you will see the toolbar showing. Your site visitors will not see it, only users that are logged in.
The toolbar makes it incredibly easy to toggle back and forth between your dashboard and your website or blog by simply hovering over the house icon. A quick way to add new posts and pages is hovering over the plus icon.
POST
When WordPress was originally created it was set out to be used as a blogging platform, so posts are the original content type. Posts typically refer to blog posts but are commonly used for anything like news, press releases, etc. Posts are going to be displayed on your website or blog in reverse-chronological order. This can be changed, though.
PAGE
Another content type in WordPress is Pages. Pages are used for static content (content that doesn’t change regularly) for example, a “Contact” page or a “Services” page.
CATEGORY
Categories are a great way you can organize your posts into groups or topics making it easier for your readers to find information related to that category.
For example, on our website, a few categories we have are the following: Beginner’s Guide, Best WordPress Plugins, and WordPress Tutorials.
When you write posts, you can assign categories to them, and your site visitors can filter your posts by category that way they can see only the posts they’re interested in. If you need to assign multiple categories to a post you can do that as well. You don’t have to use categories if you don’t want too. Completely up to you.
TAG
Tags like categories are another way to organize your posts via topic. The difference in categories and tags is categories organize posts by broad topics, tags organize posts by specific topics or keywords.
For example, our WordPress blog might categorize a review about Bluehost, but it might tag it with these keywords: Bluehost, reviews, etc.
Now, if someone reading that review wants to see more reviews for Bluehost, whether it be for hosting services, domain name service, etc. They can use that tag to see other posts with the same keyword.
HOME PAGE
The homepage can be a tricky term in the WordPress world. A majority of web users tend to understand “Home” as being the front page of their website. WordPress was originally designed for blogging so in WordPress the default home page displays a list of your most recent posts. If you run a blog, this can be awesome. However, if you’re using WordPress to build a traditional website with a “Home” page, you will have to change your front page settings to display a static front page.
STATIC FRONT PAGE
A static front page is also known as a “splash page” or “custom home page.” This feature is useful if you want to keep your blog separate from other sections of your website. In the WordPress dashboard, you can create a page with the title “Home” and then change your WordPress settings to display this page as your front page instead of the default page.
PERMALINK
An interesting WordPress term is “ugly” permalinks. WordPress uses “ugly” permalinks by default. An example, of an “ugly” permalink, is www.example.com/?p=10. You definitely don’t want your URL structure to look like this. It’s ugly, isn’t it?
The great thing is WordPress allows you to change this setting and define your own permalink structure.
SLUG
A slug is the part of a permalink that identifies the page/post it is attached to. You will see in the example below, the post slug is “how-to-schedule-your-posts-in-WordPress.”
Once you’ve changed your permalink settings, you can use your new permalinks to create custom URLs for your pages/posts. To do this, you just edit the post slug in the WordPress page/post editor.
When you create a page or a post WordPress will automatically create a slug that matches the title of that page/post, but you can easily change this by clicking the “edit” button next to the permalink and typing in the desired slug you would like it to be.
TEXT EDITOR
The text editor is where you can make edits to your content when you create a post or page. The text editor has two modes: visual and text. The first mode is Visual, and it’s the default mode and imitates a word processor. It has a full toolbar of options that will let you change the formatting sans code. Another great thing about text editor is that you can write in HTML and the text editor requires manual formatting. You can easily switch between the visual mode and text mode by just clicking the tabs located in the upper right corner.
MEDIA LIBRARY
The media library is where all your images, videos, pdfs, and other files that you upload to your website or blog. You can find this tab over on the left-hand side of the menu towards the top in your dashboard.
THEME
You will hear this a lot in the WordPress community. A theme is a collection of files, such as, “templates and stylesheets” that define the appearance of your website. WordPress Themes control the design, layout, and features of your website or blog. By just switching the theme you can completely change the look and feel of your site or blog while keeping your current posts and pages.
You can find a ton of free WordPress themes available here. If you want your website or blog to really stand out and look professional, I highly recommend buying a premium WordPress theme which you can find a complete list of them here. Another option is to create a custom WordPress theme. If you don’t have a lot of design and coding knowledge to create a custom WordPress theme if you head on over to Freelancer.com you can post any kind of WordPress job no matter how small the project or task is and get quotes from multiple WordPress developers within your budget even if it’s limited. We are giving $20 to you for free to use towards your first project on the platform. Click here to get your free $20 credit.
MENU
Menus are a WordPress feature that you will typically see at the top of a website known as the “header,” on the side of a blog post referred to as the “sidebar,” or down at the bottom of a website known as the “footer”. The Menus feature in WordPress allows you to create custom navigation menus for your site or blog. You will see WordPress menus including links to pages, posts, categories, custom links, and more. There is no limit to the number of menus you can build which makes this feature great.
PLUGIN
Plugins are small pieces of software that can be installed through WordPress to extend the features of your website. Plugins are used to add design features, like adding a Twitter feed to your website or blog. Plugins are also used for functionality, like adding google maps to your contact page on your site or improving your SEO.
WordPress has an extensive library of free plugins available which you can find here. You can also buy premium plugins, which often come with tech support and they can be found here.
WIDGET
Widgets are the most difficult WordPress feature to explain, simply because they don’t have a single set purpose.
Initially, widgets allowed you to add content and features to the sidebars of your website without using any code. Like adding a menu, a list of your most recent blog posts, categories, tags, etc.
Now, you can easily add widgets to any widget-ready areas of your website or blog. Widget-ready areas are defined by your theme. Some themes have widget-ready areas in the footer so you can add a custom copyright statement. Other themes have widget-ready areas in the header so you can add social media links.
With WordPress having an extensive plugin library, you can use widgets to add virtually anything to any part of your website or blog.
Final Thoughts
We hope this article we call WordPress dictionary helped you understand the WordPress lingo and the basic understanding of WordPress features.
Let us know in the comments below if this was helpful! We would love to hear from you.
If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.
- How To Remove Bluehost Coming Soon Page? - April 23, 2024
- Bluehost Node.js Hosting 2024 - March 1, 2024
- Namecheap Black Friday Deals 2024 - September 4, 2024
Leave a Reply
Want to join the discussion?Feel free to contribute!