These tutorials are appropriate for those new to WordPress, or for non-coders.
The changes to WordPress are not only in the user experience and interface, but in the terminology as well. This glossary should help with the learning curve when navigating the new editor, as well help you to make sense of tutorials and be able to search for help more effectively.
A block theme, or block-based theme, is the same as a full site editing (FSE) theme.
A classic theme is one that doesn’t work with full site editing.
Whether you are a site owner or a developer, there’s new lingo to learn. Get started with our Full Site Editing glossary.
If you use a classic theme, you will still be using the block-based editor for your posts and pages, but you’ll be dependent on your theme to provide editing capabilities for other parts of your site, like the header, footer etc.
Classic themes utilize either their own custom options panel, or the WordPress customizer to provide design and other controls.
WordPress block patterns are mini-templates. They are pre-configured groups of blocks that give you shortcuts to creating certain features on your site, like a call to action, a nice-looking hero image with text, or even a whole page layout.
They are available to insert on any page, and then the content can be edited.
Preconnect to required origins is a PageSpeed recommendation that you may see if your site loads files from external domains. It can be satisfied by adding either preconnect or dns-prefetch directives to your page.
preconnect and dns-prefetch are types of “resource hints” which are used to try and speed up the loading of files hosted on 3rd party domains.
Resource hints are small pieces of HTML that are added to the page, to communicate to the browser to start specific tasks as soon as possible.
This is what resource hints look like in the HTML of a page:
<link rel='dns-prefetch' href='//fonts.googleapis.com' />
<link href='https://fonts.gstatic.com' crossorigin rel='preconnect' />Code language: HTML, XML (xml)Don’t get this confused with preload, another type of resource hint, which is used for specific files.
In this article I’ll explain the difference between preconnect and prefetch, which you should use, and how to add these to your site.
Implementing browser caching on your WordPress website improves performance for visitors who visit multiple pages or visit your website multiple times.
It allows their computer to store commonly used files in their browser which means pages can be displayed faster on those repeat visits.
The Google PageSpeed recommendation to serve static assets with an efficient cache policy is all about browser caching. It’s usually pretty straightforward to fix on WordPress sites.
“Static assets” means the files on your site: CSS, JavaScript, images, fonts, videos (and other media files).
“Efficient cache policy” means that they have a long enough browser caching value so that they do not have to be downloaded by your site visitors frequently. Usually 4 months or longer is enough to satisfy Google and other tools.