Key Components of a WordPress Site
There are some things that need a bit of explaining before we get much deeper. For lack of a better term, we’ll call them “components.” Components represent the main parts of a WordPress site, including the actual files that make things go, and the database that houses all of the data. Together, these two components - the files and database - generate the web pages for your site. Once generated, there are two central types of these web pages, the Admin area that only you see, and the public pages that the whole world can see. Let's take a closer look at each of these different components.

WordPress Core Files
When you go to WordPress.org and download a copy of WordPress, you are down­loading the WordPress core files. It’s a big folder full of files and a few subfolders full of even more files. Once you download and unzip the WordPress package, you’ll notice that most of the file and folder names begin with a “wp-” prefix.

The WordPress core files are the things that make WordPress tick, the things that make WordPress a complete software package. Most of these files you’ll never touch. A few of them you’ll touch very rarely, and a certain subset of these files you’ll be in and out of all the time, especially when building a theme.

WordPress makes controlling the content of a website easy. It can be done by you, or you can train another person to do it, because the Admin area is as intuitive as it is powerful. WordPress gives you the keys to build sites easily with all the modern features that clients crave. And because WordPress is free, open source, and has fostered a giant community around it, you’ll always be in good hands. WordPress has changed the face of publishing content on the web, and we are all reaping the benefits. For all these reasons and more, we can safely say that WordPress is amazing.

How to Optimize and Secure WordPress
Out of the box, and with a full cup of common sense, WordPress is a reasonably se­cure software package. But if you are up to snuff as a web designer/developer, you understand the importance of security and know that it is up to you to do every­thing possible to keep your site safe and secure. There are a slew of precautionary measures you can take to help with security, and we’ll show you all of them. Things like locking down sensitive files, checking file permissions, and using various mani­festations of "security-through-obscurity."

While we are at it, we'll customize our sites to streamline and optimize the effi­ciency of WordPress. Many of the things that can make WordPress faster are also things that can make any site faster, like reducing HTTP requests and optimizing images. But there are many WordPress-specific things you can do as well, like cach­ing data, keeping your database optimized, and reducing the number of database queries.