Know The Must-Have 10 Components of a Website for better Management

Trying to know the components of a website? Website is, nowadays, a very essential digital entity which lets you perform a lot of works over the web using Internet. Millions of websites are hosted on web hosting companies worldwide. The number of site are on the increase. Owing to widespread use of network connectivity, telecom evolution and the growing of popular CMS, businessmen, enterpreneurs and people of various occupation want to have their presence in the digital world. They want to create new site and deal in online business activities. This article gives you a detail on what are the ‘Components of a website’.

Website consists of several files, folders, directories containing various pages, posts and categories. Whatever may be the type of websites, but they all have registered domains and web hosting service providers.

Page of Contents:

• What is a website?
• How to visit a website?
• What are the components of a website?
  1. Domain name
  2. TLD
  3. URL
  4. Internet Protocol
     • HTTP
     • HTTPS
     • SSL/TLS
  5. Directory
     • Folders
     • Files
       • Pages
       • Posts
       • Categories

What Is a Website?

A Website is a digital entity consisting of files and folders containing pages, posts and categories which visitors can access through a web browser on using the URL of the site. Each website has a unique Uniform Resource Locator(URL) that assigns a unique location to the site in the world wide web. You can’t access a website until you type that web address on your browser’s tab and hit the Enter to send an HTTP request to the server on which the site stays. Once the resource is found, the server sends back the page to the visitors device and the page loads on it.

How to Visit a Website?

Don’t know how to visit a website? It is quiet easy. To visit a website you need three things—–A device, network connectivity and the server on which the site stays must be active and running. The server hosts the site and gives response. A device is needed from where you need to conduct a search, type the web address or do anything else. When you send a query from your device or client, it must be connected to Internet in order to send the request to the targeted server. Once the client sends the request reaches the server, the server sends back a response to the client or to the end users, on using a proper HTTP response code

Suppose you are going to visit Google. So, open your browser and type the website name ‘Google’ or the web address ‘www.google.com’ inside the search box as indicated in the screenshot. Once you have entered the web address, click on the search button located at the right side on the same tab.

What Are the Components of a Website?

Want to know the components of a website? Thanks for your query. The components of a website are those parts which together form a website. Whenever you want to create a website, you must need these components. So, the components of a website are domain name, TLD, URL, Internet protocol including HTTP, HTTPS, Directory, Files, Folders, Posts, Pages, Categories etc.

Domain name

Domain name is the must-have for a website. Without it, you can’t make a website. Each time you visit, access and read a website, you need to type the web address inside the search box and hit the enter to send an HTTP request to the server. The web address contains the domain name which consists of site title and and the TLD. The part of the web address which lies in between the double slash(//) or www and the dot after TLD forms a domain name.

There are many websites in the Internet of which most of them use www as part of their URL but some of them do not have www at their site adress.

Suppose your site address is https://www.mybloggingtipsforu.com. This site address contains both the https and www. But also, you remove www from your site address.

So, the site address may be as follows:

• http://www.mybloggingtipsforu.com
• https://www.mybloggingtipsforu.com
• http://mybloggingtipsforu.com or
• https://mybloggingtipsforu.com

Now, you can see the domain name which I have underlined in the infographic.

TLD or Top Level Domain, an Element of Domain

TLD or Top Level Domain is the part of the domain that comes after the dot.

In the each web address, you can see that the domain name has an ending with the .com extension. This part, namely, the dot com(.com) is a TLD and each domain has a certain type of extension. There are several hundred popular TLDs in the IANA database.

URL, One of the parts of a Website

URL or Uniform Resource Locator is the specific location of a web resource where it stays. Every link, post, page or image has a unique URL in the web. The URL contains protocol, domain name and the end part which comes after the slash(/) ending at domain name.

Whenever you want to access and view a website, you need to type its URL. As for example, the unique URL for my site ‘Bloggingnowatoz.com’ is https://www.bloggingnowatoz.com .

There are billions of pages in the Internet and each page has a unique Uniform Resource Locator where the resource itself remains.

While browsing over the Internet to visit sites, look at the browser’s tab and you can see the unique URL of the site or the resource that has uploaded to your device.

Protocol, a Website Component

Protocol or Internet Protocol is a scheme developed and invented by Sir Tim Berner-Lee, a British software engineer. He, first of all, invented the world wide web and protocol to transfer data, share link and send email between computers.

When he invented the protocol, it was simple. But as days gone, the protocol developed and it came under the the World Wide Web(W3) Consortium in 1994 in the United States.

Now, the protocol used worldwide are HTTP or Hyper Text Transfer Protocol. The updated version of it is HTTPS.

HTTP

HTTP stands for ‘Hypertext Transfer Protocol’ which is the primary protocol used over the Internet to transfer and communicate data from clients to servers. Using Internet users send queries or request from the clients(like browsers) to the servers and the servers send back answers(response) to the clients. When data loaded on user’s screen, they can access, view and interact with it. Now, HTTP makes data communicate from the clients to the servers and again from the servers to the clients. The protocol uses hypertext documents, hyperlinks, Hyper Text Markup Language(HTML) etc. Over the world Wide web, users access, read, view and hear various web-based resources like texts, web pages, images, files, folders, pdf, audio, video etc. To transfer such kind of resources, both the clients and servers use HTTP. So, HTTP is one of the components of a website in data communication.

“HTTP is a primary protocol used to communicate data between clients and servers over Internet. All kind of web-based documents like hypertexts, hyperlinks, HTML texts etc are used over the web through this protocol”.

HTTPS

HTTPS stands for ‘Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure’ which is the updated version of HTTP. You can see that the there is an extra letter ‘S’ which here stands for ‘secure’. Actually, when Internet was born, it was very simple, users were limited and there were no security threats, vulnerabilities and other forms of manipulative attempts that the bad guys commit to gain their personal ends. As days gone, there appeared security flaws and to make data communication more secure the former protocol was modified and updated which is now known as HTTPS. This protocol uses a security certificate. So, in terms of infrastructure, HTTPS is one of the components of a website.

“HTTPS is the updated version of HTTP which allows to communicate and transfer data being encrypted. When HTTPS enabled on your web server, namely the hosting server, data is transferred from the server to the client in encrypted form”.

SSL or TLS, a Constituent Element of a Website

SSL stands for ‘Security Socket Layer’ which is an electronic data file installed on your website to encrypt data. When data communicates from the clients to the server and vice versa, there is a risk of data theft, data hijacking ,data rerouting or man-in-the-middle attack which may result in security flaws, financial loss, site incredibility, data breach etc.

” Using TLS or SSL is a good option if you want to encrypt your data when it travels from the servers to the clients. It prevents data leakage, man-in-the-middle attack and your data remains safe so far as it remains in between the servers and the clients”.

Bloggingnowatoz

To thwart such kind of contretempts and to fill in the security loophole, SSL or TLS was invented. Both the terms refer to the same thing. However, the former term is better known to the users.

SSL is one of the components of a website.

Directory, One of the Components of a Website

Now, let’s look at the files, folders and directories of a website like Bloggingnowatoz. How can you see and access these files, folders and directories of your website? If you have launched a WordPress site, you see these elements from within your cPanel which contains all the tools of your website.

File Manager is a option which you can see inside your cPanel. Click on it and you can see the main directory of your site which may have a directory path like home/directory/cPanel username, home directory/cPanel user name etc. This directory contains all the sub-directories, folders and files of your site.

The important sub-directory under your site’s main directory are:

• Public_html
• Public_ftp
• Mail
• SSL
• Trash etc.

The Public_html contains:

• WP-Admin
• WP-Content
• WP-Includes etc.

These are the main folders under the Public_html which contains important files of your WordPress site.

This is the WP-Content folder which contains following files like:

• Themes
• Plugins
• Maintenance
• Font
• Uploads etc.

Besides, there are many other files inside the wp-content folder of your site. It is one of the important components of a website.

WP-Includes is another important folder which contains a lot of files on blocks, CSS, images etc.

The important files under the wp-includes are as follows:

• CSS
• Customize
• Certificates
• Images
• Fonts
• .JS
• Sitemap
• PHPMailer
• Widgets etc.

Your site contains pages, posts and categories as well as other components. There are many components of a website which together form a website which helps a site work smoothly.