Web design & SEO terms, in plain English.
The web, SEO and data world is full of jargon that quietly excludes the people paying for it. This is a plain-language glossary of the terms our clients actually run into — each explained simply, and linked to a deeper guide if you want the full picture.
Web design & performance
Responsive / mobile-first design
A site built to work on a phone first, then scale up to desktop — not a desktop site squeezed onto a small screen. Most local traffic is mobile, so this is the baseline, not a feature. See mobile-first web design.
Core Web Vitals
Google's three measures of real-world page experience: loading (LCP), responsiveness (INP) and visual stability (CLS). They influence rankings and, more importantly, whether visitors stay. See why your WordPress site feels slow.
WordPress
The content platform behind a large share of the web. Built properly it gives you ownership, easy editing and full SEO control; built badly with stacked plugins it gets slow and fragile. See WordPress website design.
WooCommerce
The ecommerce layer for WordPress — it turns a site into an online store you own, with no per-sale platform fee. See ecommerce web design.
301 redirect
A permanent "this page has moved" instruction that passes a page's search equity to its new URL. Skipping these during a rebuild is the usual reason a site loses rankings. See refresh vs rebuild.
SEO & visibility
Local SEO
The work that gets a business found for "near me" and suburb searches — Google Business Profile, reviews, local citations and on-page signals. See local SEO foundations.
Technical SEO
The foundations that let search engines crawl, render and index a site cleanly — crawlability, indexation, structured data, internal links and speed. See technical SEO.
Schema / structured data
A standardised way to label what content means (a service, an FAQ, a business) so search engines can show rich results. See schema markup for websites.
Google Business Profile
The free Google listing that shows your business in Maps and the local pack. For many local businesses it drives more enquiries than the website in the early months. See Google Business Profile setup.
Conversion rate (CRO)
The share of visitors who do what the page is for — call, enquire or buy. Conversion work is usually cheaper than more traffic. See website conversion improvements.
Accessibility, data & integration
WCAG / web accessibility
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines — the standard for making a site usable by people of all abilities (contrast, keyboard use, alt text, labelled forms). WCAG 2.1 AA is the practical target. See website accessibility.
API integration
Connecting two systems so they share data automatically — for example a website form creating a lead in your CRM, or a CRM pushing invoices to accounting. See API integration services.
ETL
Extract, Transform, Load — the process of pulling data from your systems, cleaning it and loading it somewhere it can be reported on reliably. See ETL and near real-time dashboards.
Data warehouse
One clean, combined copy of the data spread across your other systems, so you can report across all of them and get one trustworthy answer. See what a data warehouse buys a small business.
Brand & content
Brand identity
The whole system a business looks and sounds like — logo, colour, type, imagery, voice and the rules that keep it consistent everywhere. More than a logo. See brand identity design.
Logo vs brand identity
A logo is one asset; a brand identity is the system it lives inside. Knowing the difference stops you paying for the wrong thing. See logo vs brand identity.
Heard a term that isn't here?
If something a designer or developer said left you nodding along politely, ask us — we'll explain it in plain English, no jargon and no charge.