I spend a lot of my day speaking to people about websites. I mean, a lot. I speak to people on Zoom calls, on the phone, in person, on Social Media, and sometimes (and I’m not proud of this) I even dream about websites. True story!

One of my favourite things about websites, other than the different design options to make them completely unique, is how accessible they are. You don’t need to wait for opening hours to access them. If you want to read a page more than once you can, interesting articles are posted to websites daily, the opportunities they present are endless.

There is something I’m not so keen on though and that’s when people use complicated terminology around websites. Just as you wouldn’t expect to know all the terminology and techniques used when building a house, it’s natural you wouldn’t know all the terminology and techniques used for websites.

From time to time you may come across some jargon that leaves you feeling a bit bewildered. So I have compiled a list of terminology used for websites which I hope you’ll find useful.

Back Links

A link that goes from one website to another. If you link to another website from a page or post on your website you are creating a back link.

Domain

This is the address of your website – for example: thisdemandinglife.com

Domain Authority

This is a search engine score which ranks how well your website is going to perform in search engine results. (This is why optimising your website and content for search engines is important).

Functionality

Functionality relates to the different functions available to add on to a website for example the WooCommerce plugin adds a shop functionality to a website.

Hosting

This is the server which stores your website files known as ‘hosting’ your website.

Landing page

This is a page designed solely for someone to ‘land on’. It will have a clear call to action – sign up, buy now etc. It usually is independent from the website (you can’t navigate to the rest of the site) and the visitor would have been led to the page via a link on Social Media or in an email.

Load times

This is how long it takes for a website page to load. How fast your website is directly affects how well it ranks on Search Engines. Things which affect load times are: server speed, size of images, number of clickable elements (like buttons) on a page.

Navigation

This is a fancy word for menu. The main navigation is the main menu on the website.

Page Builder

Page Builders are used to build the styling elements of websites such as text and image blocks. The most popular website themes come with page builders: Divi, Avada, Elementor. There are also stand alone page builders such as WP Bakery and Beaver Builder.

Platform

A platform is the software used to build a website on, there are many but the popular ones are: WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Magento, Wix, SquareSpace, Shopify.

Plugin

Plugins are used to extend the functionality on WordPress websites. You can have plugins for anything – contact forms, calendars, anti-virus, design & styling, there are over one million available.

Reskinning

Reskinning means using existing code for the framework of a website or app and building styling elements on top of it. This method is used when working with prebuilt websites and templates.

SEO

Stands for Search Engine Optimisation. This is where you run through procedures which makes your website and its’ content favourable for search engines (like Google) to choose your website in their search results.

Squeeze page

Another word for Landing page. Squeeze pages particularly focus on collecting ‘opt in’ email addresses.

SSL Certificate

Stands for ‘Secure Sockets Layer’. The technical explanation is it establishes an encrypted link between a website and its visitors which protects the website visitor when on the website. The layman’s explanation is it provides the little lock symbol next to your website address and if you don’t have an SSL Certificate (this gets setup with your website hosting) visitors will get a security warning when trying to access your website.

Template

This is a prebuilt website which you can then drop content into. There will be limited ways in which you can alter the design to make it fit your brand. Wix, SquareSpace and some free WordPress themes offer templates for website building.

Theme

These are building tools for WordPress. A theme will have the framework and tools (see page builders) to build custom websites.

URL

Stands for ‘Uniform Resource Locator’ – it’s essentially an address for different website pages. It uses the domain followed by the category or name of the page. For example: https://thisdemandinglife.com/digital-resources/

White Labelling

Replacing existing branding with another. For example you can use a White Label plugin to replace the name ‘WordPress’ with your own website on the admin login page. It’s also the technical term if you were to use a website template and replace the generic brand with your own.

Is there any jargon you did already know? Is there anything you think I’ve missed and you’d like an explanation for? Let me know in the comments below.

I also spoke about this on a Facebook Live which you can watch by clicking here.

Want to talk websites? Want a free, no-obligation chat? The button below will take you to my calendar where you can book a Zoom session with me.