ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Frontend and backend

Imagine a restaurant. The customer walks in and looks at the menu, which is the frontend. The customer orders food, and the waiter takes the order and gives it to the chef in the kitchen. The chef cooks the food, which is the backend. Finally, the waiter brings the food out to the customer.

In the same way, a website has two parts: the frontend and the backend. The frontend is what you see on your computer screen when you visit a website. It's the menu of the website, where you see all the different pages, pictures, and buttons.

The backend is like the kitchen in a restaurant. It's where all the important stuff happens that you don't see. It's where the website is built and managed. It includes things like the database, programming languages, and servers that make the website work.

So when you type something into a search bar on a website, the frontend sends that information to the backend. The backend then looks through all the information it has stored and finds what you're looking for. It sends that information back to the frontend, which shows it to you on your screen.

So, just like a restaurant, a website needs both frontend and backend to work properly. The frontend is what you see, and the backend is what makes it all happen behind the scenes.