Basic Freestyle skateboard tricks involve balancing on some other part of the board than all four wheels, such as two wheels or one wheel, the tail of the board, or the edges on either side. It includes flipping and manipulating the skateboard in and out of these stances which were invented in the earliest years of skateboarding, this forms the basis of freestyle or flat ground skateboarding.

Aerial skateboard tricks involve lifting the board into the air and holding it to your feet either with your hands or just through your momentum.

These tricks were first made famous by Tony Alva who invented the front air in empty swimming pools in the late 1970s. This has then spread to include the bulk of basic skateboarding tricks like the Ollie and its variations.

Flip tricks can be regarded as a subset of aerials based on the Ollie. One of initial aerial tricks was the Kick flip. It involves spinning the board around many rotations in one trick. These tricks were definitely most famous amongst street skateboarders. Although ramp skaters perform these tricks as well.

Lip tricks are performed on the coping of a pool or skateboard ramp. Most grinds can be classified as lip tricks. There are also some coping tricks which need momentum and vertical altitude which can be only gained on transitioned riding surface. These includes inverts and it's variations and some dedicated air-to-lip combinations.

We can combine many types of basic and distinct skateboard tricks to make many new and more complicated tricks, this is what keeps skateboarding unique amongst most sports.

Most of the names of standard, basic or easy tricks were made up by the person that invented them, and to some extent they reflect what the person was thinking about the trick at the time. We can see that earliest tricks were often named after the person who found them. E.g. Andrecht after Dave Andrecht; Ollie after Alan "Ollie" Gelfand; Elguerial after Eddie Elguera.

Some tricks have more than one name because several people independently invented the same trick around the same time and gave it different names, or because the original name was lost.

Most newer skateboard tricks (basic or easy) are created by combining existing tricks or trick together rather than creating something completely new and unique, and the naming reflects that. Danny Way became the first to do a Kickflip into an Indy, so he simply called it a kickflip indy.