- Theme
- Controls how your WordPress site looks — layout, colours, fonts. A custom theme is built for your brand; a premium theme is bought and customised.
- Child theme
- A safe layer over a parent theme where your customisations live, so parent updates don't wipe them out.
- Plugin
- Adds functionality — forms, SEO, payments, security. Good sites use few, well-kept plugins; bad ones collect dozens.
- Gutenberg (block editor)
- WordPress's built-in page builder. Content is assembled from blocks (paragraphs, images, buttons) instead of shortcodes.
- Elementor / page builder
- Visual drag-and-drop builders. Fast to start, but heavy pages often need cleanup for speed.
- Shortcode
- A small bracketed tag like [gallery] that inserts dynamic content. Modern sites increasingly replace these with blocks.
- Widget
- A small content block for sidebars and footers — search boxes, recent posts, contact details.
- Menu
- Your navigation links, managed under Appearance → Menus. Locations (header, footer, mobile) are assigned by the theme.
- User roles
- Administrator, Editor, Author, Shop Manager and similar — control who can publish, edit products or change settings.
- Permalink
- The permanent URL pattern for posts and pages. Set once to a clean post-name structure and rarely change it.
- Media library
- Where images, PDFs and videos live. Large uploads here are the most common cause of slow WordPress sites.
- Revision
- Saved drafts of each edit. Old revisions pile up in the database and are pruned during maintenance.
- Transient
- Temporary cached data (e.g. API responses). Corrupt or bloated transients can break dynamic features until cleared.
- WP-CLI
- The command-line interface developers use for fast updates, search-replace during migration, and maintenance scripts.
- Multisite
- One WordPress install running many sites (e.g. branches or languages) from a single dashboard. Powerful but harder to maintain.
- Staging site
- A private copy where updates and redesigns are tested before touching the live site. Every serious site should have one.
If a proposal mentions several of these terms together — for example a custom child theme with Gutenberg blocks instead of a heavy page builder — that usually signals a maintainable build. If you are unsure what your current site uses, our WordPress maintenance cost guide explains what to check first.
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