Glossary
Plain-language definitions for terms that come up in web projects: WordPress, SEO, hosting, and how the web works.
Plain-language definitions for the WordPress, technical SEO, training, and digital-delivery terms used across This Is My URL. Each term links to articles where it appears in real implementation context.
I write these definitions from hands-on delivery experience. Substantive updates are dated.
A
AI hallucination
A confident, fluent answer an AI invented, most likely where real information is thin: names, dates, sources, recent events.
Anchor text
The visible, clickable words of a hyperlink, a direct relevance signal to search engines about the linked page.
API-first backend
A website built so its content lives behind a clean data interface, an API.
Artificial intelligence
Software that does tasks we used to think needed a person, like understanding language or spotting patterns, by learning from lots of data.
Asset bloat
A page loaded with more scripts and media files than it needs to do its job.
Asset dequeuing
The practice of stopping scripts from loading on pages where they aren't needed.
Attribution
Assigning conversion credit across all marketing touchpoints to determine which channels and messages actually drove the sale.
C
Caching
Storing a ready-made copy of something and reusing it instead of rebuilding it every time.
CAN-SPAM
The US law setting baseline rules for commercial email: opt-out model, accurate headers, physical address, and a 10-day unsubscribe.
Career transition
A deliberate shift in role, industry, or employment structure that requires new skills, credibility, and a revised professional narrative.
CASL (Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation)
Canada's anti-spam law, which requires consent before you send marketing email to Canadians.
Cloudflare Stream
Cloudflare's pay-as-you-go video platform with automatic transcoding and global CDN delivery, charged per minute stored and streamed.
Cognitive friction
The extra mental effort a person spends on your site, making them hesitate or give up.
Cognitive load
The amount of mental effort someone needs to take in and use your content.
Compliance training
Mandatory employee education on the laws, regulations, and company policies a role must follow, with auditable completion records required.
Consulting
Expert advice and analysis delivered to client organizations to solve problems, improve performance, or implement change.
Content audit
A systematic review of every URL to decide what to keep, improve, consolidate, or remove.
Content modelling
Deciding what your content is made of before building the pages that hold it.
Conversion rate optimization
Systematically increasing the percentage of visitors who complete a desired action, without spending more on traffic.
Core Web Vitals
Google's three real-user metrics (LCP, INP, and CLS) measuring load speed, interactivity, and visual stability as ranking signals.
Corporate training
Structured employee learning programs covering compliance, onboarding, skills development, and leadership preparation.
Crawl depth
How many clicks a page sits from your homepage, affecting search engine attention.
Crawl equity
The limited attention a search engine spends moving through your site, shared across its pages.
CRM
A central platform storing all prospect and customer data (contact history, deal stage, and follow-up tasks) in one place.
CRM integration
Connecting your website directly to your customer-management system for smoother follow-up.
Custom post types
WordPress's way of handling content beyond blog posts and pages, with custom fields and archives.
E
Edge caching
Storing web assets on globally distributed servers so visitors receive content from a node geographically close to them.
Editorial workflow
The documented sequence of steps, from idea to publish, governing how content is planned, written, reviewed, and distributed.
Email marketing
Using email to build audience relationships and drive conversions, consistently the highest-ROI digital marketing channel.
Enterprise WordPress
WordPress deployed at organizational scale with governance, SSO, multi-site management, and MarTech integrations.
Excel training
Structured instruction building Excel proficiency from basic formulas through PivotTables, Power Query, and automation.
F
Faust.js
WP Engine's open-source framework for building headless WordPress sites with Next.js, handling auth, routing, and previews.
FTC
The US federal agency enforcing CAN-SPAM, advertising disclosure rules, and data privacy practices for commercial marketers.
G
Gated content
A valuable resource that visitors can only get after handing over their contact details.
Generative AI
AI that produces new text, images, or audio rather than only sorting and scoring things that already exist.
H
Headless CMS
A setup where you manage content separately from where it's shown to visitors, through an API.
Headless WordPress
Using WordPress to edit and store content, while a separate front-end application shows the site.
Helpful content
Content written for real human readers that demonstrates first-hand expertise and fully satisfies search intent.
High availability
An architecture with no single point of failure: multiple servers, replicated databases, and automatic failover.
I
Image pipeline
The automated workflow that converts, resizes, compresses, and delivers images in the optimal format per device.
Instructional design
Applying cognitive psychology and adult learning theory to create training that produces measurable behaviour change.
Integration tax
The ongoing cost of connecting your software together, often hidden in custom code and setup.
Internal linking
A web of links between your pages, guiding visitors and signalling importance to search engines.
L
Large language model
The kind of AI behind tools like ChatGPT, trained on huge amounts of text to predict which words come next.
Lazy loading
Delaying the loading of parts of a page until they are actually needed, as the visitor scrolls.
Lead capture
Collecting contact information from prospective customers, typically via a form offering a lead magnet in exchange.
LearnDash
The most widely deployed WordPress-native LMS, supporting courses, quizzes, drip scheduling, and payment integrations.
Lighthouse
Google's open-source auditing tool scoring Performance, Accessibility, Best Practices, SEO, and PWA readiness from 0 to 100.
LMS
Software for creating, delivering, and tracking training programs, used by corporate L&D teams and online course creators.
LXP
A learner-centric platform curating personalized, AI-recommended learning pathways across multiple content sources.
M
Machine learning
Teaching software by showing it many examples instead of writing out every rule by hand.
Metadata
Quiet, behind-the-scenes information that describes content, like its author and publish date.
Moodle
The world's most-installed open-source LMS, purpose-built for universities and institutions needing full data sovereignty.
N
Next.js
A React framework offering server-side rendering and static generation, the most popular headless WordPress frontend.
Nofollow
A link attribute telling search engines not to pass ranking credit to the linked page.
O
Object cache
A server-side layer storing expensive database query results in Redis or Memcached for instant reuse across requests.
Observability
Understanding a system's health through structured logs, metrics, and traces, detecting problems before users report them.
On-page SEO
Optimizing titles, headings, content, and internal links on a page to earn higher search rankings.
Over-engineering
Building something more complex than it needs to be, adding overhead and slowing future change.
Over-optimization
Applying SEO techniques so aggressively (keyword stuffing, manipulative links) that rankings drop instead of rising.
P
Page caching
Saving pre-built HTML to disk or memory so subsequent visitors receive it in milliseconds without re-executing PHP.
Page dilution
When too many similar pages or links split a site's ranking authority, so none ranks well.
Plugin audit
A structured review of every installed plugin for necessity, security, maintenance status, and redundancy.
Plugin dependency
When a site leans on many interacting plugins, so any change risks breaking something.
Prompting
Telling an AI tool what you want. Specific context and constraints turn a vague answer into a useful one.
R
Real-user monitoring
Capturing web vitals from actual users' browsers on a live site, as opposed to simulated lab tests.
RSS feed
A standardised file listing your content for other software to read automatically.
S
Sales tools
Software applications enabling salespeople to prospect, communicate, present, and close deals more efficiently.
Schema
Structured data markup that tells search engines what your content means, enabling rich results in search.
Search intent
What a person actually wants when they search, often more than the literal words suggest.
Self-hosted video
Storing and streaming video from your own infrastructure for maximum control over branding, data, and player behaviour.
SEO
Improving a website's unpaid search visibility by satisfying user intent better than any competing page.
Site performance
How well a site operates across speed, reliability, error rates, and caching, a broader measure than page load alone.
Site quality
A holistic measure of how well a site serves visitors across content depth, technical reliability, and trust.
Site speed
How quickly a page's content loads and becomes interactive, directly tied to rankings and conversion rates.
SVG (Scalable Vector Graphic)
An image made from mathematical paths in XML: scalable and ideal for logos and icons.
T
Taxonomy
The WordPress system for grouping content into organized collections, powering archive pages, filtering, and navigation.
Technical debt
The long-term constraints that build up from quick fixes, slowing everything down over time.
Technical SEO
Making sure search engines can crawl, index, and render a site cleanly by tuning its infrastructure.
Training technology
The tools and platforms (LMS, authoring software, video hosting) used to design, deliver, and track workplace training.
U
Unsubscribe
The legally required mechanism allowing any recipient to permanently opt out of future commercial emails from a sender.
V
Video hosting
Services that store, encode, and stream video files adaptively, removing the bandwidth burden from your own server.
Video schema
VideoObject structured data that enables rich video results (thumbnails and duration) directly in search listings.
Video SEO
Optimizing video content and page context to appear in Google's video carousel and YouTube search results.
VideoPress
Automattic's video hosting service, integrated natively with WordPress and Jetpack, needing no external platform account.
Vimeo
A professional, ad-free video host with privacy controls, a branded player, and per-viewer analytics unavailable on YouTube.
W
WordPress
The open-source CMS powering over 43% of the web, built on PHP and MySQL with a block editor.
WordPress architecture
The structural design decisions governing how a WordPress site is built, deployed, and scaled.
WordPress audit
A full technical and content review of a WordPress install, delivering a prioritized remediation roadmap.
WordPress hosting
Hosting services specifically optimized for WordPress, with server-level caching, staging environments, and auto-updates.
WordPress maintenance
Ongoing updates, backups, security scanning, and database optimization keeping a WordPress site secure and reliable.
WordPress performance
How quickly and efficiently a WordPress site loads, measured through Core Web Vitals, TTFB, and page weight.
WordPress procurement
The process of evaluating, selecting, and contracting for WordPress software, hosting, and development services.
WPGraphQL
A WordPress plugin that adds a fully featured GraphQL API, enabling flexible content queries from any frontend framework.
Y
YouTube
Google's video platform and the world's second-largest search engine: free distribution in exchange for your audience data.
These definitions exist because the words get used at people who were never given a chance to learn them. If a term here is showing up in a quote, a proposal, or an argument about your own site and you would rather talk it through than read about it, tell me what you are looking at. If you want to see the ideas as finished work instead, the case studies are the longer answer, and services covers what I actually do.