If you’ve landed on this post because you’re deciding whether to go with WordPress or Squarespace, let me make your decision easier for you: choose WordPress every time. While both provide a platform for you to build a website, they are vastly different. WordPress is used by more than 27% of all websites on the internet while Squarespace, on the other hand, powers 1.2 million websites. WordPress is available both as hosted and self-hosted options (we’ll dig into that further down), while Squarespace is available only as a hosted version.

A lot of posts on this blog attempt to explain WordPress concepts and terminology, or at least those that are relevant to the post. And the WordPress Codex does a great job of explaining the concepts used by WordPress. But following lots of questions I’ve seen in comments on posts asking for definitions and explanations, I thought it would be useful to create a jargon buster for WordPress users and developers. So in this post I’ll attempt to define and explain some of the key concepts in WordPress. Some of these are more relevant for users, others for developers, and some for both.