Glossary

Plain-language definitions, no jargon.

Throughout the site you will find underlined terms, like this glossary term, that show a short definition when you hover over them. This page collects them all in one place, organized A through Y. If a word in my writing is not clear, it is probably here.

A

A/B test: Showing two versions of a page (or button, headline, image) to different visitors and measuring which one performs better. Useful once you have meaningful traffic; rarely useful for a brand-new local site.
Above the fold: The portion of a page visible without scrolling. The term comes from newspapers but still matters: most visitors decide whether to stay or leave based on what shows in the first screen.
Accessibility: Designing the site so that everyone (including people using screen readers, keyboard-only navigation, or magnification) can use it. I build every site to WCAG 2.2 AA as a baseline.
Alt text: The short written description attached to an image. Screen readers read it aloud, and it shows up if the image fails to load. Meaningful images get real alt text; purely decorative images are hidden from assistive tech.
Anchor link: A link that jumps to a specific spot on a page (e.g. /faq/#pricing). Useful for long pages and the table-of-contents pattern I use on technical guides.
Anchor text: The visible, clickable text inside a link. Good anchor text describes the destination ("see the pricing"); bad anchor text doesn't ("click here"). Affects both accessibility and SEO.
Anycast: A network routing technique where the same IP address is announced from many locations worldwide, and traffic automatically goes to the closest one. Cloudflare's edge runs on Anycast, which is why my sites have sub-100ms response times almost everywhere.
API: Application Programming Interface: a way for two systems to talk to each other. The forms POST to Web3Forms' API; my analytics dashboards read from Cloudflare's API. Most things on the modern web run on APIs under the hood.
ARIA: Accessible Rich Internet Applications: a set of HTML attributes that help assistive technology understand non-standard interface elements. Used sparingly, because semantic HTML already does most of the job.
Aspect ratio: The width-to-height shape of an image or video (e.g. 16:9 widescreen, 4:3 classic, 1:1 square). Locking the aspect ratio in CSS prevents layout jumping while images load.
AVIF: A modern image format that compresses photos roughly 50% smaller than JPEG with the same visual quality. Every site I build serves AVIF first, with WebP and JPEG as fallbacks.

B

Backlink: A link to your website from someone else's website. Google uses backlinks from reputable sources as a signal that your site is trustworthy, which can help with ranking.
Backup: A saved copy of your site so you can roll back if something goes wrong. Because my sites are stored in Git, every change is itself a backup; I can restore any prior version in seconds.
Bandwidth: The total amount of data your site serves to visitors over time. On Cloudflare Pages, bandwidth is unmetered, so a viral month doesn't trigger a surprise bill.
Bot: An automated program that visits websites. Some are good (Google's crawler indexing your site), most are not (scrapers, spammers, vulnerability scanners). Cloudflare blocks the bad ones at the edge.
Bounce rate: The percentage of visitors who land on a page and leave without interacting with anything else. A high bounce rate isn't always bad (someone reading an FAQ and getting their answer is fine), but it can flag pages that aren't doing their job.
Breadcrumb: The small navigation trail near the top of a page that shows where you are (Home / Services / Roofing). Helps both visitors and search engines understand the site's structure.
Brotli: A modern compression algorithm that shrinks the size of HTML, CSS, and JS over the wire by 15 to 25% more than gzip. Cloudflare serves all my sites with Brotli enabled.
Browser: The program your visitors use to view your site (Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Edge). I test every site against the latest two versions of all four major browsers, on both desktop and mobile.
Bunny Fonts: A privacy-respecting mirror of Google Fonts. Same fonts, no cookies, no tracking, no consent banner required. Every site I build uses Bunny by default.

C

Cache busting: Forcing browsers to re-download a file after we change it. I append a content-hash to URLs (e.g. style.css?v=4a701c) so a deploy invalidates returning visitors' caches automatically.
Caching: Saving a copy of something so it doesn't have to be fetched or computed again. The browser caches images; the CDN caches HTML; the build caches generated assets. Every layer makes the site faster.
Call to action (CTA): The button or link that asks the visitor to do the thing you want them to do (book a call, request a quote, download a guide). Every page on every site I build has at least one clear, prominent CTA.
Canonical URL: The official "this is the real address of this page" tag in the HTML. Tells search engines to ignore duplicates (e.g. with tracking parameters). Every page on my sites has one.
CDN: Content Delivery Network: servers around the world that serve your site's files from whichever location is closest to the visitor. One of the reasons my sites stay in the green Core Web Vitals band on Google PageSpeed.
Citations (local SEO): Mentions of your business name, address, and phone number on directories like Yelp, Bing Places, the BBB, and trade-association sites. Consistent citations help Google verify your business is real.
CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift): One of Google's Core Web Vitals; measures how much the page jumps around as it loads. A good score is under 0.1; I target under 0.05.
Cloudflare Pages: Cloudflare's static-site hosting product. Runs on their global edge, free for unlimited bandwidth, automatic HTTPS, one-click rollbacks. Where every site I build is hosted by default.
CMS: Content Management System: software that lets non-technical users edit a website through a browser interface. WordPress is the most common. I do not use one by default; clients email me what they want changed instead.
Color contrast: The brightness difference between text and its background. WCAG 2.2 AA requires 4.5:1 for normal text and 3:1 for large text. I check every color combination on every site I ship.
Compression: Shrinking files so they take less time to download. Images get compressed visually (AVIF, WebP); HTML, CSS, and JS get compressed losslessly (Brotli, gzip). Both are automatic on every site I build.
Conversion: A visitor doing the thing you wanted them to do: filling a form, calling, requesting a quote. The whole point of the site, expressed as a number you can measure.
Cookie: A small piece of data the browser stores for a site. Some are essential (theme preference, login session), most are tracking. My default stack uses zero tracking cookies, so no banner is required.
Copy: The actual words on the page. Good copy is short, clear, written in the voice of the customer, and structured so a skimmer can still understand it. Most of what makes a site work isn't the design.
Core Web Vitals: Google's three main performance measurements: LCP (loading), INP (interactivity), and CLS (visual stability). Affects search ranking. I hit the "good" threshold on all three on every site.
Crawl: What search engines do to discover and re-read your pages. I make crawling easy: clean URLs, a complete sitemap, no JavaScript barriers, fast response times.
CSP (Content Security Policy): A security header that tells the browser exactly which sources of scripts, styles, images, and frames are allowed to load. Stops most cross-site scripting attacks. Configured tightly on every site I ship.
CSS: Cascading Style Sheets: the language that controls how a website looks (colors, layout, typography, spacing). I write vanilla CSS with custom properties, no framework.
Custom-coded: A website written from scratch, with no WordPress, no page builders, and no template shop. Faster, more secure, and unique to the business it's built for.

D

Dark mode: An alternate color scheme designed for low-light viewing. My sites support light, dark, and "follow system" modes via a toggle in the header. Saves to your device so the next visit applies it automatically.
DDoS protection: Defense against distributed denial-of-service attacks: thousands of bots trying to flood your site offline. Cloudflare absorbs them at the edge before they ever reach your origin. Included on every site I host.
Defer: An HTML attribute on script tags that says "load this in the background and run it after the page is parsed." Keeps JavaScript from blocking the rendering of your content.
Deploy: The act of pushing a new version of the site live. For us this happens automatically when I push to GitHub; Cloudflare builds and deploys in under 60 seconds.
DKIM, SPF, DMARC: Three DNS records that prevent spammers from impersonating your domain in email. I set all three at launch for every client domain that handles email.
DNS: Domain Name System: what translates your domain (like "yourbusiness.com") into the address of the server that holds your site. When I launch, we point your DNS at my hosting.
Domain: Your website address (e.g. "yourbusiness.com"). You own it, registered in your name. I never own your domain; I just point its DNS at my hosting while you're a client.
Domain authority: A third-party score (Moz, Ahrefs, etc.) estimating how strong your domain is in search. Useful as a relative trend; not an official Google metric. Don't obsess over the number.

E

E-E-A-T: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness: Google's framework for evaluating content quality, especially on YMYL (your money, your life) topics. Real photos, real names, real reviews, and real credentials beat anonymous content every time.
Edge: The set of servers physically closest to your visitors. The "edge" of a CDN is where your site is actually served from for any given request. Cloudflare's edge has 300+ locations worldwide.
Eleventy (11ty): The static site generator I use to build every site. Open source, fast, written in JavaScript. Takes templates, content, and data and produces flat HTML at build time.
Email deliverability: Whether legitimate email from your domain actually reaches the recipient's inbox instead of spam. Driven by DKIM, SPF, DMARC, and your sending reputation. I configure the foundation; I do not manage outbound sending.
Email forwarding: A service that takes mail sent to you@yourdomain.com and forwards it to your existing inbox (Gmail, etc.). Free with most registrars; what I recommend if you don't need a full mailbox.
Encryption: Scrambling data so it's unreadable without a key. HTTPS encrypts the connection between visitor and site; password storage encrypts at rest. I use modern, audited encryption everywhere it's needed.

F

Fallback font: The font shown if your primary web font fails to load. I pair every web font with a system-font fallback that's metrically similar, so the page doesn't reflow when the real font swaps in.
Favicon: The little icon that shows up in browser tabs, bookmarks, and home-screen shortcuts. I generate a full favicon set (every device, every browser, every variant) automatically at build.
FCP (First Contentful Paint): The time from when a visitor clicks your link to when they see anything (text, image) on screen. I target under 800ms.
font-display: swap: A CSS rule that tells the browser "render text in the system font immediately, then swap in the web font when it loads." Eliminates the "blank text while font loads" delay.
Footer: The strip at the bottom of every page. Standard contents: site name, contact info, copyright, secondary links (privacy, terms, accessibility, sitemap). My footers are uniform across the site for findability.
Form spam: Fake submissions sent by bots. Without protection, contact forms get flooded. I block it with hidden honeypot fields, time-on-page checks, and Web3Forms' built-in filtering.

G

GA4: Google Analytics 4: the current version of Google's analytics platform. Cookie-based, requires consent in the EU, and changed everything from how it counted sessions to how reports are built. Optional on my sites; every site comes with Cloudflare + Umami by default.
GDPR: General Data Protection Regulation: the EU's privacy law. Requires consent for tracking that uses cookies or shares data outside the EU. My default analytics stack (Cloudflare + Umami) is GDPR-compliant by design.
Git: The version-control system that tracks every change to your site's source code. Each change has a timestamp, an author, a description, and is fully reversible. Foundation for both backups and audit trail.
GitHub: Where I store the source code for every site. Each client site lives in a private repository. Every change is committed, signed, and reversible.
Google Business Profile (GBP): Your free business listing on Google Maps and Search. Separate from your website but tightly tied to it. We wire your site's structured data to your GBP so they're treated as the same entity.
Google Search Console: Google's free tool that shows how their crawlers see your site, what searches you appear for, and what errors they hit. Connected at launch for every client.
Google Tag Manager (GTM): A container that lets non-developers add tracking scripts to a site without code changes. Powerful, but adds weight and a third-party dependency. I do not install it by default; I add only the tags you actually need.
gzip / Brotli: Compression algorithms that shrink files in transit. Cloudflare uses Brotli (slightly better) when the browser supports it, gzip otherwise.

H

H1, H2, H3 hierarchy: The heading order of a page. One H1 (the page title), then H2s for major sections, H3s for subsections. Critical for both SEO and screen readers; I enforce it on every page.
Hash: A short fingerprint generated from a file's contents. I use it for cache busting (the ?v=4a701c in CSS URLs) and for Subresource Integrity (proving a third-party script hasn't been tampered with).
Headless CMS: A content management system without a built-in front end; it provides content via API and a separate site renders it. I use one (Sanity or Decap) only for clients with high-volume editorial workflows.
Honeypot: A hidden form field that real visitors never see (and never fill in) but bots usually do. Catches spam without forcing humans through CAPTCHAs.
Hosting: The service that stores your website's files and serves them to visitors. On the monthly plan, hosting is included. You don't manage a control panel or a billing relationship with a hosting company.
HSTS: HTTP Strict Transport Security: a header that tells browsers "always use HTTPS for this domain." Once a browser sees it, it refuses to connect over plain HTTP, even if a malicious link tries to.
HTTP/2: The previous-generation web protocol. Multiplexed connections, header compression, server push. Faster than HTTP/1.1, still widely used. Cloudflare serves HTTP/2 to any browser that doesn't support HTTP/3.
HTTP/3: The latest version of the protocol that powers the web. Faster on flaky connections (it doesn't fall over when one packet is lost). Cloudflare serves all my sites with HTTP/3 by default.
HTTPS / SSL: The little padlock in the browser bar. It means the connection between the visitor and your site is encrypted. Every site I build ships with HTTPS on day one.

I

Iframe: An HTML element that embeds another web page inside your page. Common for maps, video players, embedded forms. I sandbox iframes via CSP so a compromised third party can't pivot into your site.
Image optimization: Making images smaller without making them look worse. My pipeline emits AVIF, WebP, and JPEG at multiple widths so the browser picks the smallest version that fits the visitor's screen.
Indexed: A page is "indexed" once Google has crawled it and added it to their search results. New pages typically take a few days to a few weeks to be indexed.
Inline CSS: CSS written directly inside the HTML rather than loaded from an external file. I inline a small block of "critical" CSS in the page head so the first paint doesn't wait on a network round-trip.
INP (Interaction to Next Paint): One of Google's Core Web Vitals; measures how fast the page responds when you tap or click something. Good is under 200ms; I target under 100ms.
Internal link: A link from one page on your site to another page on your site. Helps visitors discover content and helps search engines understand which pages are most important.
IP address: The numeric address of a computer on the internet (e.g. 104.21.7.1). DNS converts your domain into one. Cloudflare hides your origin's real IP, which blunts a whole class of direct attacks.

J

JAMstack: A web architecture pattern: prebuilt JavaScript-and-Markup pages served from a CDN, with APIs handling anything dynamic. The pattern every site I build follows.
JavaScript: The language that adds interactivity to web pages. My sites use vanilla JavaScript (no framework) and ship under 10 KB of it on a typical page. The site works without it; JS just makes a few interactions nicer.
JPEG: The 30-year-old standard image format. Universally supported. Still the floor I deliver (after AVIF and WebP) so every browser sees the photo.
JSON-LD: The format I use for structured data. A small JSON block in the HTML head that tells search engines what kind of business you are, where, what you charge, and so on. See "schema markup."

K

Keyword: The actual phrase a customer types into Google ("emergency plumber Denver", "commercial roof inspection Phoenix"). Modern SEO writes for the question behind the keyword, not for the keyword itself.
KPI: Key Performance Indicator: the small handful of numbers that actually matter for your business (booked calls, quotes requested, organic visits from your service area). Everything else is noise.

L

Landing page: A focused single page built for one specific goal, often paired with an ad campaign. Stripped of nav, optimized for one CTA. I can build dedicated landing pages on any site I host.
Lazy loading: Holding off on loading images and other assets until the visitor scrolls near them. Native to modern browsers via loading="lazy". Massive bandwidth savings on long pages.
LCP (Largest Contentful Paint): One of Google's Core Web Vitals; measures how long until the biggest visible element (usually a hero image or headline) appears. Good is under 2.5s; I target under 1.0s.
Lighthouse: Google's open-source auditing tool. Runs in Chrome DevTools or as CI. Checks performance, accessibility, SEO, and best practices. I aim for 95-100 across the board.
Local SEO: The discipline of ranking for "near me" and city-specific searches. Driven by Google Business Profile, citations, reviews, and on-site signals (real address, schema, service-area pages). Where most of my clients' wins come from.
Long-tail keyword: A more specific, lower-volume search phrase ("flat-roof leak repair contractor in Aurora CO" vs. "roofer"). Less competitive, higher intent, easier to rank for; the bread-and-butter of small-business SEO.

M

Map embed: An interactive map dropped onto a page. I use Leaflet with OpenStreetMap tiles, not Google Maps embeds, because the OSM stack has no cookie or consent overhead.
Markdown: A plain-text writing format that converts to HTML. Used for blog posts and long-form content. Easy to read in raw form; easy to write without knowing HTML.
Media query: A CSS rule that applies styles only at certain screen sizes (e.g. "only on screens under 768px wide"). The mechanism behind responsive design.
Meta description: The short summary Google shows under your page title in search results. 50 to 160 characters, written for the searcher, not the algorithm. Every page on every site I build has a custom-written one.
Minification: Stripping whitespace and shortening code in HTML, CSS, and JS without changing how it works. Saves bandwidth. I minify all three on every production deploy.
Mobile-first: Designing for the phone screen first and scaling up to larger screens, rather than the reverse. The way I build every site, because most service-business traffic is on mobile.
MX records: The DNS records that say "email for this domain goes to this server." I set them at launch for whichever email provider you choose.

N

Name servers: The authoritative DNS servers for your domain. Set at the registrar level. When we point your domain at my hosting, I do it by changing your DNS records, not your name servers.
noindex: An HTML tag (or HTTP header) that tells search engines "do not list this page in search results." Used on internal-only pages, thank-you pages, and any unfinished or private content surface.
Nunjucks: The templating language I write our pages in. Looks like HTML with extra {% %} and {{ }} markers. Lets us reuse layouts, partials, and data across many pages.

O

OG image: The preview image that appears when your URL gets shared on social media or chat apps. I generate one for every page on every site I build, not just the home page.
On-page SEO: The parts of SEO that live on your site itself: titles, headings, meta descriptions, internal linking, schema, page speed, accessibility. The half of SEO we control directly.
Off-page SEO: The parts of SEO that live elsewhere: backlinks, citations, reviews, Google Business Profile activity. The half of SEO that's earned over time, not coded in.
Open Graph: The set of HTML tags that controls what your link looks like when someone shares it on Facebook, LinkedIn, Slack, iMessage, or anywhere else. Every page on my sites has them.
Operational pages: The infrastructure pages every professional site needs: Privacy Policy, Terms of Use, Accessibility Statement, Sitemap, Style Guide, Contact, Thank-You. Every site I build includes them; they don't count against your page limit.
Outage: Time when your site is unreachable. My hosting is designed to make these vanishingly rare; when one does happen, we hear about it from monitoring before you do.

P

Page builder: A drag-and-drop tool (like Elementor or Divi) that sits on top of WordPress and lets non-developers assemble pages. They produce slow, bloated code; a major reason I do not use them.
Page weight: The total kilobytes a page transfers on first load (HTML + CSS + JS + images + fonts). The industry average is over 2 MB. My typical page weight is under 200 KB.
Pageview: One visit to one page. The base unit of most analytics platforms. Useful as a trend; not a substitute for measuring conversions.
Pagefind: The full-text search tool I ship on every site. Index is built at compile time; search runs entirely in the visitor's browser. No server, no API, no cookies.
PageSpeed: Google's tool for measuring how fast your site loads. Scored from 0-100 on both mobile and desktop. I target 95-100 on every site I build.
Permissions-Policy: A security header that disables browser features you don't need (camera, microphone, geolocation). Every site I ship denies them by default.
PNG: A lossless image format good for logos, icons, and screenshots with crisp edges. Larger than JPEG for photos; smaller than JPEG for flat graphics. Still useful for the right cases.
Preconnect: A hint in the HTML head that opens a network connection to a third-party origin (like fonts.bunny.net) before the CSS asks for it. Shaves a couple hundred milliseconds off cold loads.
prefers-color-scheme: A CSS media query that detects whether the visitor's operating system is in light or dark mode. My sites respect it by default unless the visitor manually overrides.
prefers-reduced-motion: A CSS media query that detects whether the visitor has asked their OS to reduce animations (often for vestibular reasons). When set, I disable transitions and animations site-wide.
Privacy policy: The plain-language description of what data your site collects, how it's used, and who it's shared with. Required by GDPR, CCPA, and most state privacy laws. Every site I build has one tailored to the actual stack.
PurgeCSS: A build-time tool that scans your HTML and removes unused CSS rules from the final stylesheet. Shrinks page weight without changing how the site looks.

Q

QR code: A square barcode that opens a URL when scanned by a phone camera. Useful for vehicle wraps, business cards, and yard signs. I can generate branded QR codes pointing at any page on your site.
Query string: The part of a URL after the ?: /landing/?utm_source=google&utm_campaign=spring. Used for tracking and filtering. I make sure query strings never break canonicalization or indexing.

R

Redirect: An automatic forward from one URL to another. Use a 301 for permanent moves (preserves SEO), 302 for temporary. I set them up at the edge so they're instant and don't depend on the origin server.
Registrar: The company you bought your domain from (GoDaddy, Namecheap, Porkbun, Cloudflare Registrar, etc.). Where you renew it. Always stays in your name; I never transfer registration to ourselves.
Resolution: The pixel dimensions of a screen or image (1920×1080, 2x retina, etc.). I serve appropriately sized images for every common resolution via the responsive-images pipeline.
Responsive design: A website that adapts to the screen it's being viewed on: phone, tablet, or desktop. I design mobile-first because 70%+ of service-business searches happen on a phone.
robots.txt: A file at /robots.txt that tells search-engine crawlers what they can and can't index, plus the location of the XML sitemap. Every site I build ships one.
Rollback: Reverting the live site to a previous version. Cloudflare Pages keeps every prior deploy; one click puts the old version back. I have never needed it for an emergency, but it's there.
RSS feed: An XML file at /feed.xml that lists your latest blog posts in a format any reader app can subscribe to. I generate one automatically for every site with a blog.
RUM (Real User Monitoring): Performance data collected from actual visitors instead of synthetic lab tests. Cloudflare's RUM gives us real-world Core Web Vitals across your entire visitor population without using cookies.

S

Schema.org: The shared vocabulary search engines agreed on for structured data: types like LocalBusiness, Service, FAQPage, BreadcrumbList. Every site I ship has the relevant schema for its content.
Schema markup: Structured data you add to your site that helps Google understand what kind of business you are, where you serve, what you charge. I include local-business schema on every site.
Screen reader: Software that reads the page aloud for blind and low-vision users (VoiceOver on Apple, NVDA and JAWS on Windows, TalkBack on Android). I test every site against at least one.
Search index: The data structure (often a JSON file) the on-site search reads from. Built at compile time so search runs locally in the browser without hitting a server.
security.txt: A standard file at /.well-known/security.txt that tells security researchers how to responsibly disclose vulnerabilities. Required by some industries; included on every site I ship.
SEO: Search Engine Optimization: building your site so it shows up in Google for the searches your customers are doing. I build the on-page foundation; rankings come from that plus time, content, and reviews.
Semantic HTML: Using HTML elements for their intended purpose: headings for headings, lists for lists, buttons for buttons. The foundation for both accessibility and SEO.
Service area: The geographic region you serve. I build per-area landing pages with real local content, not thin doorway pages, so each one is genuinely useful and indexable.
Sitemap: A file (usually at /sitemap.xml) that lists every page on your site for search engines to crawl. I generate one automatically and submit it to Google Search Console at launch.
Skip link: The "Skip to main content" link that's the first focusable element on every page. Lets keyboard and screen-reader users bypass the nav. Required for WCAG 2.2 AA.
Slug: The last segment of a URL (the about-our-team in /about-our-team/). Lowercase, hyphenated, descriptive. I pick slugs intentionally because URLs are a SEO surface.
Source map: A separate file that maps minified code back to the original. Useful in dev tools for debugging; I ship them on staging but disable on production.
SRI (Subresource Integrity): An attribute that lets the browser verify a third-party script hasn't been tampered with by checking its hash. I use it on every external resource where the source supports it.
SSG (Static Site Generator): A tool that takes templates and content and produces flat HTML files at build time. Eleventy is the SSG I use. The opposite of a CMS that renders pages on every request.
Structured data: Machine-readable metadata added to a page so search engines can build rich results (star ratings, prices, FAQs, opening hours). I use the JSON-LD format with schema.org vocabulary.
Subdomain: The part before your main domain (e.g. blog.yourbusiness.com, shop.yourbusiness.com). Useful for branding sub-projects without buying a new domain.
SVG: Scalable Vector Graphics: an image format defined as math, not pixels. Stays sharp at any size. Tiny file size for icons and logos. I use SVG everywhere I can.
System font: The default font already installed on the visitor's device (San Francisco on Apple, Segoe UI on Windows, Roboto on Android). Loads instantly. I use it as the fallback before the web font swaps in.

T

TBT (Total Blocking Time): How long the page was unresponsive to input during initial load. I target under 100ms.
Theme toggle: The light/dark/system control in my site headers. Saves your choice locally so the next visit applies it before paint, with no flash of the wrong theme.
Title tag: The HTML <title> element: the line shown in the browser tab and as the headline in search results. Single biggest on-page SEO surface. I write one for every page.
Touch target: The clickable size of a button or link. WCAG 2.2 AA requires at least 24×24 CSS pixels; I set every interactive element to 44×44, which is the practical minimum for fingers.
Tracking pixel: A 1×1 image (or invisible script) that loads from a third-party tracker (Meta, Google Ads, etc.) and reports the visit back. I add only the pixels you actually need, after disclosing them in the privacy policy.
TTFB (Time to First Byte): How long it takes from a visitor's click to the first byte of HTML arriving. Cloudflare's global edge keeps ours under 100ms for most North American visitors.

U

Umami: Open-source, cookie-free analytics. Same data Google Analytics gives you (page views, referrers, devices, event tracking) without the cookie banner or the privacy concerns. Included on every monthly-plan site I build, every client gets a private live dashboard link on launch day.
Uptime: The percentage of time your site is reachable. Ours runs 99.99%+ on Cloudflare's global edge. Monitored every minute from three regions; I get paged before you notice.
URL: Uniform Resource Locator: the full web address of a page, including protocol, domain, path, and any query string. The actual identity of a page on the web.
UX (User Experience): Everything about how a visitor feels using your site: how fast it loads, whether it's clear what to do, whether the form actually submits. The thing that decides whether they convert.

V

Validator: A tool that checks your HTML, CSS, or schema for errors. The W3C runs the canonical HTML and CSS validators; Google runs one for structured data. We run all three before launch.
Variable fonts: A single font file that contains every weight and width as adjustable parameters. Smaller download than shipping each weight separately. I use variable fonts whenever a family supports them.
Vendor lock-in: When the platform you're on makes it expensive or impossible to leave (proprietary page builder, closed CMS, custom plugins). My sites have none: source code in your GitHub, plain HTML output, portable to any host.
Viewport: The size of the browser window where your site is being viewed. Mobile viewports are typically 360-430 px wide; desktop 1280-1920 px. My designs respond fluidly across the entire range.

W

Waterfall (loading): The chart in browser dev tools showing every resource a page loads, in time order. Reveals what's blocking, what's slow, what's redundant. The standard tool for diagnosing performance problems.
WCAG 2.2 AA: Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, version 2.2, Level AA: the W3C's accessibility standard. Covers contrast, keyboard navigation, screen-reader support, and more. My working baseline on every site.
Web font: A font loaded from the web (e.g. via Bunny Fonts) rather than relying on the device's installed fonts. Lets you use brand-specific typography while still rendering quickly.
Web3Forms: A lightweight third-party service that handles contact-form submissions without a backend server. Fast, spam-resistant via honeypot and rate limiting, what every one of my sites uses for forms.
WebP: An image format that compresses photos roughly 25% smaller than JPEG. Every browser since 2020 supports it. I serve it as the fallback when AVIF isn't supported.
WHOIS: The public registry that lists who owns each domain and when it expires. I monitor WHOIS expiration directly so renewal reminders don't depend on the registrar's email.
Wireframe: A low-detail sketch of a page's layout, with boxes for content and lines for type. Useful for agreeing on structure before getting into visual design. My process skips formal wireframes in favor of a working draft you can click.
WordPress: A content management system that powers about 40% of the internet, and is the single most-hacked platform on the web. I do not build on it, for security and performance reasons.

X

XML sitemap: The machine-readable list of every page on your site, formatted in XML, served at /sitemap.xml. Submitted to Google Search Console at launch so new pages get found quickly.
XSS (Cross-Site Scripting): An attack where malicious code gets injected into a page and runs in your visitors' browsers. Mostly prevented by writing safe templates and a tight Content Security Policy, both of which I ship by default.

Y

YMYL: "Your Money or Your Life": Google's shorthand for topics where bad information can hurt people (health, finance, legal, home safety). Held to a higher quality bar in search ranking. Worth knowing if your business serves any of those.
YouTube embed: An iframe that pops a YouTube player onto your page. Adds significant weight and tracking. I replace it with a click-to-load thumbnail, so the player only loads when a visitor presses play.

Missing a term? Let us know and I will add it.

Have a question?

I would rather explain than let you guess.

If anything on this site or your own isn't clear, just ask. I am happy to walk you through what something means. No jargon, no pressure.

Start a Conversation See the FAQ