Glossary
Drowning in acronyms
Today the world has become obsessed with acronyms and we are practically drowning in them. Here in the UK, people understood things like the BBC or ITV when it came to watching the television, or getting an MoT for your car to make sure it was roadworthy. But text messaging brought with it LOL, LMAO and an ever expanding list of terms for people who can't be bothered to type complete words.
I still prefer full words and write longhand, but then again, I always have a pad and pencil on my desk 😊 Oh yes, and then there are emojis, but that's an entirely separate topic.
To help us all navigate the ever growing landscape of acronyms, here's a glossary of common terms that we'll endeavour to keep up to date for us all.
Under the bonnet
Domains, hosting and the plumbing underneath
The parts nobody sees until they stop working. Most of these turn up in conversations about moving a website, changing email provider, or working out why something isn't loading.
The internet's address book. It turns a domain name people can remember into the numerical address a computer actually needs.
The numbering system that gives every device and server on the internet its own address.
The bit at the end of a domain name. .co.uk, .com, .org and so on.
The full web address of a page, including the protocol, the domain and the path.
The language browsers and servers use to talk to each other. The S means the conversation is encrypted, which is now the baseline expectation for any website.
The certificate and encryption behind the padlock in your browser. SSL is the older name that stuck, TLS is what's actually in use today.
How long a piece of DNS information is cached before it's checked again. It's why domain changes sometimes appear instantly for you and an hour later for someone else.
A network of servers around the world that keeps copies of your site's files close to your visitors, so pages load faster wherever people are.
A slice of a physical server reserved for you alone, with its own resources. A step up from shared hosting.
Methods of moving files to and from a server. SFTP is the encrypted version and the only one worth using now.
A secure way of connecting to a server to run commands directly.
The company supplying your internet connection.
An encrypted tunnel between your device and the internet, often used to work securely from outside the office.
Software you use through a browser and pay for by subscription rather than installing and owning outright.
The raw materials
The building blocks
The languages, systems and tools a website is actually made of. You don't need to know any of this to run a business, but it helps when you're deciding what to build on.
The structure of a web page. Headings, paragraphs, images, links, and the framework everything else hangs on.
The presentation layer. Colours, spacing, typography, layout, and how all of it responds to different screen sizes.
The language that makes pages interactive. Menus, sliders, forms, animation, and increasingly whole applications.
A long established server-side language. It's what WordPress is built on.
The language used to ask a database questions and store information in it.
A defined way for two systems to talk to each other. It's how your website might pull live stock levels from a warehouse system, or push an order into your accounts package.
A common, well mannered style of building an API. Most of the APIs you'll come across follow it.
A lightweight text format used to pass structured data between systems. Readable by humans, easy for machines.
An older structured data format, still very much alive in sitemaps and feeds.
The admin area that lets you edit your own website without touching code. WordPress is the best known example.
An editor that shows content roughly as it will appear on the page, rather than as raw code.
Two approaches to building pages. SSG builds them in advance so they're ready to serve instantly, SSR builds them on request. Both are quicker and safer than the old model of assembling everything on the fly, every time.
A site that loads once and then updates the content in place rather than loading new pages. Great for applications, not always the right choice for a brochure site.
The software a developer writes code in.
An automated pipeline that tests changes and pushes them live, so releases are consistent and repeatable rather than manual and nervous.
A ready made toolkit for building against someone else's platform.
Keeping logos, photography, documents and brand files organised in one properly managed place, so the right version is always the one being used.
A platform for delivering courses, training and assessments online.
The system holding your customer records, conversations and sales pipeline.
The larger back office system covering stock, finance, purchasing and operations.
Look and feel
Design and how people use your site
The vocabulary of design conversations. These are the terms most likely to come up while we're working through a project together.
Everything a visitor actually sees and touches. Buttons, forms, menus, layout.
How it feels to use. Whether people can find what they need, understand what's being asked of them, and get where they're going without friction.
How the content is organised and labelled. Get this right and the navigation writes itself.
The thing you want the visitor to do next. Get in touch, book a call, add to basket.
Building one site that adapts to every screen size rather than maintaining a separate mobile version.
Images described mathematically rather than as pixels, so they stay sharp at any size. Ideal for logos and icons.
PNG for sharp graphics and transparency, JPEG for photographs, GIF for simple animation, WebP and AVIF for modern, smaller, faster versions of both. Worth knowing that not every platform supports the newer formats, which occasionally catches people out.
RGB and HEX for screens, CMYK for print. A colour that looks right on your monitor won't necessarily look the same coming off a printing press.
Resolution measurements. DPI belongs to print, PPI to screens, and the two get muddled constantly.
The international standard for making websites usable by people with disabilities. Increasingly a legal expectation as well as the right thing to do.
Not strictly an acronym. It's accessibility with the eleven middle letters replaced by a number, which rather proves the point of this page.
Search and ads
Being found
Search, advertising and the numbers people quote at you in meetings. This is where the acronyms get thickest, and where a fair few of them are quietly meaningless.
The ongoing work of helping search engines understand your site and helping people find it. Technical health, content, structure and reputation, all pulling in the same direction.
The page of results you get after searching. Increasingly crowded with adverts, maps, answers and AI summaries before the actual results appear.
The paid side of search. Usually used to mean advertising rather than organic listings.
Advertising where you pay each time somebody clicks. Google Ads is the obvious example.
What each of those clicks costs you.
The percentage of people who saw something and clicked it. Useful for judging whether your search listing or email subject line is doing its job.
Improving the percentage of visitors who go on to do the thing you wanted, rather than simply chasing more visitors.
Google's free tool showing how your site performs in search, what it's being found for, and anything Google is struggling with.
The current version of Google Analytics. A rather different beast from the Universal Analytics that came before it.
Your listing on Google Maps and in local search. Formerly Google My Business, or GMB, which you'll still see referenced everywhere.
The tags added to a link so analytics can tell you exactly which campaign, email or post the visitor came from. Named after a company Google bought in 2005, which is why it makes no obvious sense.
The qualities Google says it looks for when judging content. Not a score you can check, more a description of what good looks like.
The handful of numbers you've agreed actually matter, as opposed to the hundreds a dashboard will happily show you.
What you got back compared with what you put in.
In the inbox
Email has quietly become the most acronym-heavy part of running a business online, largely because keeping it working now depends on three DNS records most people have never heard of.
The DNS record that tells the world which server handles email for your domain.
A DNS record listing who is allowed to send email on your behalf.
A cryptographic signature added to your outgoing email that proves it genuinely came from you and hasn't been tampered with.
The policy that ties SPF and DKIM together and tells receiving servers what to do when something fails. It also reports back to you on who is sending email using your domain, which is often quite the eye opener.
Two ways of reading email from a server. IMAP keeps everything in sync across your devices, POP3 tends to download and remove it. IMAP is almost always what you want.
The protocol used to send email.
The platform used to send marketing email to a list.
A marketing email sent to a list. Essentially a campaign send, dressed up in a three letter suit.
Of the people who opened your email, the percentage who clicked something. A more honest measure of whether the content landed than click rate alone.
Requiring something more than a password to log in, usually a code from your phone or an authenticator app. The single most effective thing most businesses can do to protect their email.
Ringing the till
Selling online
The eCommerce vocabulary, including the page types every platform assumes you already know and the product codes that quietly decide whether your listings appear anywhere.
Who you're selling to, and increasingly, whether you're selling to them yourself rather than through a retailer.
The page for a single product. You'll also hear it expanded as Product Display Page, and very commonly as Product Description Page, which is close enough that nobody ever gets pulled up on it. Detail is the version most platforms and developers use, and it's the more accurate one: the description is only a part of what the page holds, alongside the imagery, variations, price, stock and reviews. Worth noting that outside eCommerce, PDP usually means Personal Development Plan, so context matters if you work anywhere near an HR team.
The category or collection page listing several products, where people browse and filter before choosing one. Most analytics funnels are described as PLP to PDP to basket to checkout, so once you know these two, a lot of platform documentation suddenly makes sense.
A category page with proper editorial content sitting above the products. Useful where a category needs explaining or positioning rather than simply listing.
The unique code identifying a specific product or variation. You invent it, it only has to make sense within your own business, and it's yours to control. Get the SKU right and everything downstream behaves. Get it wrong and nothing does.
The umbrella term for the barcode numbers that identify a product globally rather than internally. Unlike a SKU, you can't invent one. They're issued through GS1, and they identify the product itself no matter who happens to be selling it. UPC, EAN and ISBN are all GTINs, they just differ in length and origin.
The twelve digit barcode number used mainly in North America.
The thirteen digit equivalent used across the UK and Europe, and the one you'll see on most products sold here. Officially it's now a GTIN-13, but nobody calls it that in conversation.
The thirteen digit identifier for books. It's a valid GTIN in its own right, which is why books slot into the same product data field as everything else.
The code the manufacturer uses for a part or product. It matters because when a product genuinely has no GTIN, Google and the marketplaces will usually accept brand plus MPN instead. If a Shopping feed is being rejected or an Amazon listing won't create, muddled identifiers are very often the reason.
The average amount spent per order.
The till system in a physical shop, which often needs to talk to the website.
A single source of truth for product data, feeding the website, the marketplaces and anywhere else the catalogue appears.
The company processing your card payments. Stripe, Worldpay, PayPal and so on.
The security rules that apply to anyone handling card data. In practice, a very good reason to let a proper payment provider handle the card details rather than touching them yourself.
The extra verification step your bank sometimes adds at checkout.
The process for handling returns.
Locked and fast
Speed, security and staying out of trouble
Performance measurements, the attacks they're worth protecting against, and the regulations that apply whether or not anyone told you about them.
Google's set of measurements for how a page actually feels to load and use.
How long until the main thing on the page appears.
How quickly the page responds when somebody taps or clicks. It replaced FID, First Input Delay, in 2024.
How much the page jumps about while loading. If you've ever gone to tap a link and hit an advert instead, that's a poor CLS score.
How long the server takes to start responding. Usually a hosting or application question rather than a design one.
A filter sitting in front of your site, blocking malicious traffic before it ever reaches your server.
An attack that overwhelms a site with traffic from many sources at once until it falls over.
An attack that injects malicious code into a page other people then view.
An attack that tricks a logged in user's browser into performing an action they never intended.
An attack that abuses a badly written database query to read or destroy data.
The data protection framework governing how you collect, store and use personal information. The UK has its own version post-Brexit, but the principles are the same.
The UK legislation sitting alongside UK GDPR.
The UK rules covering cookies, marketing emails and electronic communications specifically. This is the one that governs your cookie banner.
The UK regulator responsible for data protection and privacy.
The bit nobody reads and everybody agrees to.
Everyday chatter
And finally, the ones that turn up in our emails
I did say I preferred full words. In fairness, so do most of these people, right up until they're typing on a phone.
Which, depending on who sent it, means anything from "this afternoon" to "before you read this".
When something is expected to land. The word estimated is doing a lot of quiet work here.
A deadline, expressed vaguely enough to survive being missed.
Nobody has decided yet, and possibly nobody has been asked.
Started, not finished, and shown to you deliberately at this stage.
No action needed, but somebody wanted it on the record that you were told.
You missed it.
A short summary at the top of something long. Occasionally the only part anyone reads.
A gentle disclaimer attached to something about to be stated confidently.
Which it always was, with or without the letters.
Away, and hopefully properly away rather than checking email from a deckchair.
This question doesn't apply here. Occasionally used to mean "no answer", which is not the same thing at all.
Nothing here for that one
We haven't covered that term yet, which is genuinely useful to know. Tell us what you were looking for and we'll add it.
Suggest a termIf something's missing
Spotted one we've not covered?
This list will grow, because the acronyms certainly will. If you've come across something in a quote, a report or an email from us that made no sense whatsoever, tell us and we'll add it.
There are no silly questions here, only three letter answers.