Website words, explained in plain English

Analytics

A tool that counts how many people visited your site, which pages they looked at, and roughly where they came from. Useful for one thing above all: knowing whether the site is bringing you anything. Ignore the vanity numbers and watch how many people reach your contact page.

Backlink

A link to your site from somebody else's. Google treats each one as a small vote of confidence, which is why a mention in the local paper or your chamber's member directory is worth more than any amount of fiddling with your own pages.

Bounce rate

The share of visitors who land on a page and leave without doing anything else. A high number is usually a sign the page was slow, or it did not answer the question the person arrived with.

Breadcrumbs

The little trail near the top of a page that shows where you are: Home, then Websites, then the page itself. It helps people, and it helps Google understand how the site is organised.

Cache

A stored copy of your page, kept so it loads faster the next time. Handy, and the reason a change you just made sometimes does not show up until you reload properly.

CMS

Content management system. Software that lets you edit your own site without touching code, WordPress being the best known. It is genuinely useful if you update your site weekly. If you update it twice a year, it is software you have to maintain for no reason, which is why I build sites without one and make the changes for you.

CTA

Call to action. The thing you want someone to do: call, book, fill in the form. A page with no obvious call to action is a brochure, not a website.

DNS

The internet's phone book. It is what connects your domain to wherever your site actually lives, so that typing your address gets people to your pages. It is also why a change can take a few hours to show up everywhere.

Domain

Your address on the internet, like papaai.ca. You rent it, usually $15 to $25 a year, and it must be registered in your name. If a web designer offers to keep it under their account, say no.

E-commerce

Selling directly from your site, with a cart and a checkout. It is a significantly bigger build than a site that just describes your business, and it should be priced as one.

Favicon

The tiny icon in the browser tab. Small thing, but a missing one makes a site look unfinished.

Google Business Profile

The free listing that puts your business in Google Maps and in the box on the right of search results. For a local business it is at least as important as the website itself, and it is where your reviews live.

Hosting

The always-on computer your website files live on so people can reach them at any hour. Free to a few hundred dollars a month depending on what the site is built with.

HTML and CSS

The two basic languages a web page is made of. HTML is the content and structure, CSS is how it looks. Every website is these underneath, whatever was used to build it.

Landing page

A single page built for one purpose, usually one campaign or one offer, with one call to action and nothing to distract from it.

Meta description

The sentence Google shows under your page title in search results. It does not change your ranking, but it decides whether anyone clicks, so it is worth writing properly.

Mobile-first

Designing for a phone screen before a desktop one. Most people will see your site on a phone, so this is not a nicety.

Plugin

An add-on that bolts extra features onto a CMS, mostly WordPress. Each one is someone else's code running on your site, which means each one is something that can break, slow things down, or be exploited. A site with thirty plugins is a maintenance job forever.

Redirect

An instruction that sends anyone visiting an old address to the new one. Essential when pages move or a site is rebuilt, or the links people have saved stop working.

Responsive

A site that reshapes itself to fit whatever screen it is on. Table stakes, not a feature worth paying extra for.

Schema

Hidden code that tells search engines plainly what your page is: a business, its phone number, its area, an article, its author. It is part of why some listings show extra detail in search results, and it matters more now that AI assistants read pages too.

SEO

Search engine optimisation. Everything that makes it more likely someone finds you when they search for what you do. The basics belong in the build: clear page titles, fast loading, sensible structure, a Google Business Profile. Beyond that it is mostly reviews, useful pages, and time.

Sitemap

A file listing every page on your site, submitted to Google so it knows what to look at. Boring, invisible, and one of the first things to check if a site is not showing up.

SSL

The certificate that turns http into https and puts the padlock in the address bar. It encrypts what passes between your site and the person reading it. Browsers now warn people away from sites without one, and it is usually free.

Static site

A site made of plain, prebuilt files rather than assembled fresh each time someone visits. Faster, cheaper to host, and almost nothing to maintain. It is how I build, and it is why my hosting costs are close to nothing.

Uptime

The share of time your site is actually reachable. Anything meaningfully below 99.9 percent means your site is down often enough that people are hitting it.

UX

User experience. Whether the site is easy to use: can someone find your phone number in five seconds, does the menu make sense, does the form work on a phone. Usually more valuable than how the site looks.

WordPress

The most widely used website software in the world, and a perfectly good choice for a site that changes often or needs a shop. It also needs ongoing updates, security patches, and plugin management, which is a real cost. For a small business site that changes a few times a year, it is more machinery than the job needs.