Backend
- Also known as
- back-end
- Pronounced
- BACK-end
Backend is the part of a website the visitor never sees, and the part that actually makes it work.
If a website were a ship, the backend would be the engine room.
For practical purposes you can think of the backend as the CMS — the engine of the site — together with everything it talks to on the hosting side: the database, the web server, the mail service.
The counterpart is the frontend, the face of the site that the visitor sees and clicks on.
The two are written in different languages. Backends are typically built in PHP, Python, Ruby or Go; frontends in JavaScript, HTML and CSS. That split is why web developers themselves are split into backend and frontend specialists.
The backend is generally regarded as the more demanding, more “programmer-ish” half of building a site, while the frontend sits closer to design and to how the site feels to use.