Glossary of WordPress admin terms

Admin dashboard

The Admin Dashboard is the control panel of a WordPress site, accessible to users with administrative privileges. It allows you to manage posts, pages, plugins, themes, user accounts, site settings, and more—all from one centralized location after logging into /wp-admin.

API (Application Programming Interface)

WordPress includes APIs that let developers interact with core functionality programmatically. Examples include the REST API, which allows apps to send and receive data from a WordPress site over HTTP, making it easier to integrate with external services or custom frontends.

Back-end

The back-end refers to the admin area where users manage site content, settings, and functionality. It’s not visible to regular site visitors and includes access to tools for editing themes, managing plugins, writing posts, and configuring settings.

Block Editor (Gutenberg)

The Block Editor, also known as Gutenberg, is WordPress’s visual content editor. It allows users to build pages and posts using individual “blocks” for text, images, buttons, embeds, and more—making layout and formatting more flexible and intuitive.

Categories

Categories are a built-in taxonomy in WordPress used to organize and group related blog posts. They help with content structure and improve SEO by allowing users and search engines to understand the hierarchy and topics of your site.

Child theme

A child theme inherits the styling and functionality of another theme (the parent) and allows you to make modifications without affecting the parent theme. It’s the recommended way to customize a theme to ensure future updates don’t overwrite your changes.

CMS (Content Management System)

WordPress is a CMS—a software application that lets users create, manage, and publish content online without needing to code. It provides tools for content formatting, user roles, media uploads, and more within an easy-to-use interface.

Custom post type

Custom post types extend the default content types (like posts and pages) to accommodate different types of content, such as portfolios, testimonials, or products. They are useful for organizing data beyond standard blog posts and can be registered using code or plugins.

Customizer

The WordPress Customizer is a real-time visual interface that allows users to modify site elements like colors, typography, menus, and widgets. Accessible from Appearance > Customize, it provides theme-specific settings and a live preview of changes.

Excerpt

An excerpt is a shortened version of a blog post, usually used in post previews on archive pages. WordPress can generate this automatically or allow authors to write a custom one, helping encourage clicks while keeping layouts tidy.

Featured image

A featured image is the primary visual that represents a post or page. It’s often displayed in blog loops, sliders, and social media previews, and can be added from the post editor sidebar under the “Featured Image” section.

Media Library

The Media Library stores all uploaded files—images, videos, PDFs, and more. You can access it from the admin dashboard and reuse files throughout your site, edit metadata, and even perform basic image edits like cropping or rotating.

Menu

Menus are navigation tools that help users move around your WordPress site. You can customize menus from Appearance > Menus, where you can add pages, posts, custom links, categories, and even WooCommerce product categories if available.

Page

Pages in WordPress are static content types used for information that doesn’t change often—like About, Contact, or Privacy Policy pages. Unlike posts, they are not organized by categories or tags and don’t typically display publishing dates.

Permalink

A permalink is the permanent URL assigned to a post, page, or other content type. WordPress allows you to customize permalink structures to be SEO-friendly (e.g., /blog/how-to-start/ instead of /?p=123) through the Settings > Permalinks screen.

Plugin

Plugins are software add-ons that extend the functionality of WordPress. You can use them to add features like SEO tools, security scanning, contact forms, ecommerce, caching, and much more—many are free from the official WordPress Plugin Directory.

Post

Posts are time-sensitive entries commonly used for blogs and news content. They are displayed in reverse chronological order, support categories and tags, and often appear in RSS feeds and archive pages.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

SEO in WordPress (as in the rest of the interweb) involves optimizing your content and site structure so that search engines like Google can better understand and rank your site. Plugins like Yoast SEO or All in One SEO help manage meta titles, descriptions, sitemaps, and more.

Shortcode

Shortcodes are small code snippets enclosed in square brackets [like-this] that let you insert dynamic content or features into pages and posts. Many plugins provide shortcodes for displaying forms, galleries, sliders, and other interactive elements.

Sidebar

The sidebar is a widget-ready area in WordPress themes, often used to display navigation links, recent posts, search bars, and ads. Sidebars can appear on one or multiple sides of a page depending on your theme’s layout.

Tag

Tags are another built-in taxonomy for organizing posts in WordPress. Unlike categories, tags are more granular and describe specific details about a post’s content. They help with search filtering and related content discovery.

Taxonomy

Taxonomies in WordPress are used to classify and group content. The default taxonomies are categories and tags, but developers can create custom taxonomies for grouping custom post types (like “genre” for a book review site).

Theme

A theme controls the design and layout of a WordPress site. It includes templates, stylesheets, and optionally JavaScript to determine how your site looks. Users can install, customize, or create themes to match their branding or content style.

User Roles

WordPress has several built-in user roles (Administrator, Editor, Author, Contributor, Subscriber) that control access and capabilities. These roles define who can publish content, manage plugins, edit others’ posts, or simply read content behind a login.

Widget

Widgets are modular elements that you can add to widget areas like sidebars or footers. They provide extra functionality—like search bars, calendars, or custom HTML—and can be managed through the Appearance > Widgets or block-based editor.

WP-CLI

WP-CLI is a command-line tool that lets you manage WordPress sites using terminal commands. It’s useful for advanced users or developers who want to manage updates, plugins, users, and more without using the web interface.