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Below, I have written out the definitions of some 100 words and terms which can be a lot all at once. Here, I’ll give you the top 10 most common and essential terms that you need to understand when building your website.
When web pages outside of your website post links that lead to your website, those links are called backlinks. Backlinks (i.e. other people posting links to your website) are very useful because they show Google your website is worth visiting and reading, and brings you higher out onto search results.
Bounce rate is just how many people leave (bounce) from your website out of all your visitors. Different types of websites have different bounce rates (different percentages of people who leave immediately after seeing just one page) but generally, a 30% bounce rate is considered good.
Conversion rate refers to the rate of people that actually take an action on your website (like buying your product, signing up for your course) out of all the visitors that you get on your website.
The website copy is just another way to call all the text on the site. When you say that you need to finish the copy for the home page, that means you need to finish writing the texts for the homepage.
A Call To Action (CTA) is a way to refer to the sections in your website that, well, call people to action. For example, this could be a ‘BUY’ button. It calls people to take the action of buying. Or a banner telling you to sign up for a course. It calls people to sign up.
CTA’s are very important to include in your website to make it easier and more obvious for visitors to take the action that you want them to take.
Domain is a common way to call your website’s address. For this website, the domain is miradimi.com.
Domain authority is essentially how important your website is considered by search engines. People want to have a higher domain authority on their websites so search engines consider them more important and place them higher in search results.
Responsive design just means that your website will work on different devices, not just on a desktop. Currently, more than half of all the Internet’s traffic comes from mobile phones, so it’s quite important for your website to be able to function and look good on mobile as well.
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It’s about making it more likely for your website to appear as high as possible in search engines. There are lots of different elements to this; from making your website load fast and spreading the word about your website on social media, to organizing your website content to be best suited to search engines and appearing on other websites to build your domain authority.
This is how fast your page loads. A faster load time is always more preferable. You can check how fast your website is with Google’s Speed Insights.
Here’s the complete dictionary of terms and jargon that you might come across when building your business website! I have sorted everything in alphabet order and tried my best to explain all the words in simple English.
Feel free to refer back to this post!
Alt text, which is short for alternative text, is a small piece of text attached to an image. You used it to describe the image. It will not be visible on the actual page, but it can be read by screen readers for blind people and can help add relevant text to your website that will help you show on the right searches through search engines.
This is a way of describing everything that is visible on your website before you have to scroll down. Everything below that first scroll down will be below the fold.
API stands for Application Programming Interface. It is essentially the thing that connects two different pieces of software together. For example, if you want to connect a booking system to your website, you will need an API to connect the two of them.
It’s like how you bring an adaptor with you on your holiday; your charger cannot just fit into the different electrical outlets and you need an adaptor to connect the two of them together.
The backend is just a way to call all the machinery, software and systems behind the visible part of your website. It’s like the backstage of a theatre.
When web pages outside of your website post links that lead to your website, those links are called backlinks. Backlinks (i.e. other people posting links to your website) are very useful because they show Google your website is worth visiting and reading, and brings you higher out onto search results.
Bounce rate is just how many people leave (bounce) from your website out of all your visitors. Different types of websites have different bounce rates (different percentages of people who leave immediately after seeing just one page) but generally, a 30% bounce rate is considered good.
Here is a good article on bounce rates by Semrush.
Branding always tends to be this pretty vague concept, but it generally refers to the way companies try to create their own unique image, so they are immediately distinctive from other businesses and people remember them a certain way.
For example, when you think of Coca-Cola, it brings to mind a whole array of impressions and things you remember about it, that make it more memorable to you than any unmarked bottle of soda. And when your company is more memorable to people and your image aligns well with their values, they are far more likely to buy from you.
Caching is the process of storing data temporarily. It’s why all the images load faster the second time you visit a website; your computer has already saved the images in your cache.
When building your website, the cache can slow down your website speed if not set up properly.
CMS stands for Content Management System. It is a piece of software that lets you manage the content on your website without having to actually do everything by writing and editing the website’s code. Examples of a CMS system are WordPress, Webflow & Squarespace. They all allow you to edit the content on your website without coding everything.
Conversion rate refers to the rate of people that actually take an action on your website (like buying your product, signing up for your course) out of all the visitors that you get on your website.
The website copy is just another way to call all the text on the site. When you say that you need to finish the copy for the home page, that means you need to finish writing the texts for the homepage.
You will use different photos and videos throughout your website, but you can’t just take any piece of media that you come across the Internet for your website. Most photographs and other pieces of content are protected by law as property of the original artist and if you copy them to use on your website without any sort of permission, you could get sued.
If you want to use a piece of media, you can just ask the original creator for permission, buy a licence for the rights to use it, or find another photo that’s free for commercial use (use within a business).
There are a lot of websites that have libraries of copyright free photos, videos, and music that you can use for free. Some of the most well known ones are Pexels, Mixkit, Unsplash, and Pixabay.
CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets. It is a programming language that is used on the Internet. It determines the style for everything that is shown on your website. For example, with it, you can set the color of the page background, the color and size of the headings, the style of the buttons, the width and height of the images and lots more.
A Call To Action (CTA) is a way to refer to the sections in your website that, well, call people to action. For example, this could be a ‘BUY’ button. It calls people to take the action of buying. Or a banner telling you to sign up for a course. It calls people to sign up.
CTA’s are very important to include in your website to make it easier and more obvious for visitors to take the action that you want them to take.
DNS is the function that translates domain names that are understandable by humans (e.g. youtube.com) into something that is understandable by computers.
Domain is a common way to call your website’s address. For this website, the domain is miradimi.com.
Domain authority is essentially how important your website is considered by search engines. People want to have a higher domain authority on their websites so search engines consider them more important and place them higher in search results.
A dropdown menu is a menu which you can hover over with your mouse and another smaller menu with more links will appear. On many websites, there is a ‘Products’ link in the main menu and when you hover over it, links to each of the products will appear.
Dynamic content is content that changes depending on different parameters instead of staying static and unchanging. An example of dynamic content would be a section of your newest blog posts on your homepage. It isn’t a static section—it’s dynamic because the section would change as you add new blog posts and the new blog posts appear there.
Ecommerce is a (delightfully vague) way to call online commerce, which is practically any exchange of money that happens online. Your online shop would be an ecommerce website. Online marketplaces like Etsy also work within ecommerce.
A favicon is the tiny logo that appears when a tab with the website is open.
It’s important to remember to upload your favicon before you publish your website otherwise, otherwise you won’t be giving off the best impression.
A fixed element on your website is one that stays in one place even if you scroll past it. It will always stay fixed in the same position on your screen. You may have seen websites with headers that stay at the top of the page even if you scroll past them.
When you paste any type of link on your website, you can mark them either as follow or no-follow. If you mark them as follow, that will mean that search engines can notice the link and they will count it as a vote in favor of the website you are linking. If you mark it as no-follow, search engines will just pass it by.
A footer is a section that is shown at the bottom of most, if not all, pages on your website. Typically, it includes links to all of the website’s pages, the business’ logo, contact information, and address.
The frontend of your website is the part that everyone on the Internet can see.
A hamburger menu (most frequently seen on the mobile version of sites) has this little hamburger icon—
—and will open your website’s navigation when you click on it.
A header is a section on your website that appears at the top of most, if not all, pages on your website. It typically includes your business logo, main navigation, and a CTA button. If you have an ecommerce website, there will probably be a search function, a shopping basket, and a way to log in to your account there.
This is just a way to call the first section that comes after the header on a page. on a page.
This is where all the servers that play host to your website are. Hosting companies offer space in their servers for a monthly fee, and are used by most businesses.
HTML is the most basic programming language for webpages. It describes the structure of your website and what content is included in it.
You would often see this-> https:// before a website’s url address. HTTPS is a security protocol that shows your website is secure and less likely to have some type of malware in it.
Imagine that search engines have huge libraries of index cards detailing all the content on all the pages of every website on the Internet. They are constantly sending bots to crawl through the Internet and collect new information to index. They use that information later to create their search results. This is indexing and crawling.
This is when you integrate a piece of software into your website—for example, a booking software that is created by someone else, but you want to integrate into your own website.
Internal linking is putting links within your website that lead to another page on your own website. For example, a bit further down, I’ve mentioned one of my blog posts and added a link to it. That would be an internal link.
Javascript is a programming language that is common on the Internet. It is used for more complex functions on your website.
A keyword is a term that describes your topic well and you’d like to appear at the top of the search results for when people look it up. For example, if you are a waxing salon in London, then you want to include those keywords ‘waxing salon in London’ in your website so that you appear in the search results when people look for something like this.
Keyword research is the process of researching what people are actually searching for on Google within your topic and how to best include the keywords they are searching within your website.
A landing page is a page that focuses specifically on a single product or marketing campaign.
This is how much spacing you have between the letters in a single word.
A lightbox is a type of pop up that shows up over your regular page when a visitor clicks a button to trigger it.
Line height is how much space you have between the lines of text.
Link building is a strategy that is used to get your website higher into Google search results. You try to get as many other websites to mention your website and post links that lead to your website on their own pages. This shows to Google that others consider your content useful and worth having higher onto the search results.
Your website needs regular maintenance and upkeep. It’s not a one and done deal and you have to keep it up to date and fix things when they break. I even wrote a whole blog post about it here.
Padding is how much space you give outside your element, so it isn’t scrunched up against everything else and there is good spacing between everything.
When you have a link in your main menu, and when you click it it opens another smaller menu, that will be called a mega menu.
Metadata is the information about your page that’s not visible to most visitors but is very useful to search engines. For example, the language of your page, the title, and the summary of what the page is about.
Padding is how much space you give inside your element, so it isn’t scrunched up against everything else and there is good spacing between everything.
This is how fast your page loads. A faster load time is always more preferable. You can check how fast your website is with Google’s Speed Insights.
An image with a parallax effect would move when you scroll downwards and create an almost 3D effect. A good example of this website about The Goonies.
Plugins are third party apps that can be attached to your website. For example, if you want people to be able to make appointments on your website, it may just be easier to go to a different company like Calendly and attach their appointment booking software to your website.
A redirect happens when you change the url of an old page and want visitors to be redirected to the new page when they try to go to the old url.
Registrars are companies that loan you your website’s domain name. You can’t have two websites that use the same address, and registrars sell you the rights to use the domain name of your choice as your own.
Responsive design just means that your website will work on different devices, not just on a desktop. Currently, more than half of all the Internet’s traffic comes from mobile phones, so it’s quite important for your website to be able to function and look good on mobile as well.
Robot.txt is a file on your websites that is used by search engines to know that they can show your website on their search results and which pages to show. It’s important for SEO, and it’s good to check if it’s there on your website.
A search engine is a place where you can make searches for things on the Internet - for example, Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo are search engines.
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It’s about making it more likely for your website to appear as high as possible in search engines. There are lots of different elements to this; from making your website load fast and spreading the word about your website on social media, to organizing your website content to be best suited to search engines and appearing on other websites to build your domain authority.
A server is the physical machine where all the information and data that your website is composed of is stored.
SERP is an acronym that stands for Search Engine Results Page. It’s pretty much exactly what it says—the results page that shows up after you search for something in a search engine.
Sessions means how many times a single visitor has visited the website. A single visitor could have a single session on the website and have visited it only once while another could have five sessions and would have visited it five times.
A sidebar is a piece of content that is on the side of the page. For example, things like filtering and sorting systems, or related blog posts sections are frequently found on the side of the page next to the main content.
This is a technical document that maps out the structure of all the pages on your website.
An XML site map is a technical document with a map with the structure and all the pages on your website that bots and crawlers from search engines use to index the site more efficiently for search results.
SSL is a security protocol that protects websites and their visitors from security breaches. You can have this added to your website fairly easily and receive an SSL certificate. Most browsers will give a warning to visitors or even stop them entirely from accessing a website that doesn’t have an SSL certificate so this is definitely something that you should do.
A sticky element is almost the same thing as a fixed element - it will stay in one place even if you scroll past it. The only difference is that it won’t always stay stuck in the same place on your page. It will go back to its place after you scroll by a certain section.
A subdomain is a secondary domain that is part of your website's main url. For example, you could have your normal site name - yournormalsitename.org. And then, when you want to go to the special part of your website where, for example, all your house listings are, you could have a subdomain - listings.yournormalsitename.org.
A template is something that is ready-made, like a section, page, or even a whole website that you can use as a blueprint to build other similar things.
For example, I use a template that I built for my blog posts. This lets me avoid doing the formatting for every single blog post all over again. I just paste in the content and the template sorts out the formatting.
Traffic is just how many unique visitors you get on your website.
Typography is all about the styles of the text on your website. What font they are, what font size and weight, and how everything looks and is arranged.
UI means User Interface. It’s all about how your website looks like; the colors, branding, design, layout, and typography.
UX stands for User eXperience. It’s all about thinking what your visitors are actually experiencing when you visit your website and how you can order and structure everything so everything is as clear and easy to use as possible and to lead them towards your preferred result (e.g. them buying something).
A wireframe is a way to show the basic structure of all the content in your website without adding in the design elements. A wireframe will show where the images and text will be, but not necessarily what the text will actually say, what the images will be, and what color everything is.
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