Glossary
Short definitions of web, SEO, and digital-operations terms, grouped into collections and linked to longer explanations.
Collections
Image Optimization
Image optimization reduces unnecessary image data and loading work while preserving the visual quality required for the image's purpose.
Indexability
Indexability describes whether a page is eligible to be included in a search engine's index.
Information Architecture
Information architecture is the practice of organizing, grouping, labelling, and connecting information so people can find and understand it.
Interaction to Next Paint (INP)
Measures how long it takes for a page to visibly respond after a user clicks, taps, or types. It reflects how responsive the page feels during use.
Internal Link
An internal link connects one page on a website to another page on the same website, supporting navigation, discovery, and site structure.
Inventory
Inventory is the quantity of a specific product or product variant available for sale within an e-commerce system.
Inventory Sync
Inventory sync is the process of keeping stock quantities consistent between multiple commerce systems, locations, or sales channels.
JavaScript Bundle
A JavaScript bundle is a browser-delivered file containing JavaScript code combined from multiple modules or source files.
JSON
JSON is a text-based data-interchange format commonly used to represent and exchange structured information between software systems.
Key Performance Indicator (KPI)
A key performance indicator is a metric selected to represent progress toward an important organizational or business objective.
Keyboard Navigation
Keyboard navigation is the ability to navigate and operate a website using keyboard input rather than relying on a mouse or touchscreen.
Landmark
A landmark is a programmatically identified page region that helps assistive technology users understand and navigate the major structure of a page.
Large Language Model (LLM)
A large language model is an AI model trained to process and generate language by predicting and working with sequences of tokens.
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
Measures how long it takes for the main content of a page to become visible.
Lazy Loading
Lazy loading delays non-critical resources until they are likely to be needed instead of loading everything during the initial page request.
Main Thread
The main thread is the browser thread responsible for much of the JavaScript, layout, style, and rendering work required to run a web page.
Maintenance Plan
A maintenance plan documents the recurring work, ownership, and schedule required to keep a website healthy after launch.
Manual Accessibility Testing
Manual accessibility testing uses direct human review and interaction to identify accessibility barriers that require context, judgement, or real use to evaluate.
Measurement Plan
A measurement plan documents what needs to be understood, which signals will represent it, and how those signals will be collected and interpreted.
Merchant Account
A merchant account is an account within the payment-processing system used to receive and settle electronic transactions for a business.
Metric
A metric is a quantitative measurement used to represent an amount, rate, duration, size, or other numerical value.
Middleware
Middleware is software that sits between systems to coordinate communication, transform data, route actions, or apply integration logic.
MX Record
An MX record identifies the mail servers responsible for receiving email for a domain.
Nameserver
A nameserver is a DNS server that answers queries about a domain, with authoritative nameservers holding the definitive DNS records for that domain.
Navigation
Navigation is the system of menus, links, and other pathways people use to move between pages and sections of a website.
Noindex
Noindex is a directive that tells supported search engines not to include a page in their search index.
OAuth
OAuth is an authorization framework that lets an application receive limited access to another service without receiving the user's primary account credentials.
Occupancy
Occupancy is the percentage of a property's available room inventory that was sold during a specified period.
Online Travel Agency (OTA)
An online travel agency is a digital travel marketplace where customers can search, compare, and reserve accommodation from multiple providers.
Order Management
Order management is the process of tracking and controlling an e-commerce order from creation through payment, fulfilment, cancellation, return, or refund.
Origin Server
An origin server is the upstream server or application that stores or generates the original website response before intermediary systems such as a CDN deliver it.
Orphan Page
An orphan page is a page with no meaningful internal links pointing to it from the rest of the website.
Overbooking
Overbooking occurs when more reservations are accepted for a period than the hospitality property has actual accommodation capacity available.
Page Builder
A page builder is a visual CMS interface used to construct page layouts from configurable sections, widgets, blocks, or other reusable elements.
Page Weight
Page weight describes the total amount of data transferred to load a web page and the resources required by it.
Pagination
Pagination divides a large API result set into smaller groups that can be requested and processed separately.
Payload
A payload is the meaningful data carried inside a request, response, webhook, or other message exchanged between systems.
Payment Gateway
A payment gateway securely collects and transmits electronic payment information between a customer's checkout and the systems responsible for processing the transaction.
Payment Processor
A payment processor is a service that handles the authorization and settlement workflow required to move electronic payments between customers and merchants.
Perceived Performance
Perceived performance describes how fast, stable, and responsive a website feels to the person using it rather than how long every background resource takes to finish loading.
Plugin
A plugin is an extension that adds or changes functionality within a content management system.
Plugin Bloat
Plugin bloat is unnecessary CMS complexity caused by overlapping, poorly justified, or costly plugin dependencies rather than by plugin count alone.
Point of Sale (POS)
A point-of-sale system is the system used to process direct customer sales and may connect in-person transactions with online inventory, products, orders, and customer data.
Polling
Polling is an integration pattern where one system repeatedly requests another system to check whether information has changed.
Product Catalogue
A product catalogue is the structured collection of product information used to organize, present, sell, and manage products in an e-commerce system.
Product Feed
A product feed is a structured data source used to send product catalogue information such as price, availability, identifiers, and images to an external platform.
Product Variant
A product variant is a specific purchasable version of a product created from one or more product-option values such as size or colour.
Production Environment
The production environment is the live version of a website or application used by real visitors and connected to real operational systems.
Prompt
A prompt is input provided to an AI model that supplies instructions, context, examples, source material, or other information used to guide its response.
Prompt Injection
Prompt injection is an attack or failure mode where untrusted input attempts to manipulate an AI model's instructions or behaviour in unintended ways.
Property Management System (PMS)
A property management system is software used to manage reservations, guest stays, room status, availability, and other day-to-day hospitality property operations.
Rate Limit
A rate limit restricts how many API requests a client can make within a particular period or usage allowance.
Rate Parity
Rate parity describes consistency between comparable accommodation rates and booking conditions across different sales channels.
Rate Plan
A rate plan defines the price, restrictions, policies, and other commercial conditions under which accommodation is offered.
Redirect
A redirect automatically sends requests from one URL to another and is commonly used when content permanently or temporarily changes location.
Render Blocking
Render blocking occurs when a browser must wait for a resource or task before it can continue rendering visible page content.
Resource Hint
A resource hint gives the browser additional information that can help it prepare for or load an important resource earlier.
REST API
A REST API is a web API organized around resources and standard HTTP concepts such as URLs, request methods, headers, and status codes.
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)
Retrieval-Augmented Generation is a pattern where relevant external information is retrieved and supplied to a generative model when producing a response.
Revenue Management System (RMS)
A revenue management system analyzes demand, reservations, inventory, and other signals to support or automate hospitality pricing and availability decisions.
Revenue per Available Room (RevPAR)
Revenue per Available Room measures room revenue relative to all available rooms and can be calculated as room revenue divided by available rooms or ADR multiplied by occupancy.
robots.txt
A robots.txt file provides instructions that tell supported automated crawlers which parts of a website they may or may not request.
Rollback
A rollback returns a website or application to a previous known state when a newer deployment causes a problem.
Room Inventory
Room inventory is the accommodation capacity a hospitality property has available to sell for particular dates.
Rule-Based Automation
Rule-based automation performs predefined actions according to explicit conditions rather than relying on an AI model to interpret the next step.
Screen Reader
A screen reader is assistive technology that presents digital content through speech or braille using accessibility information provided by the interface.
Semantic HTML
Semantic HTML uses HTML elements according to their meaning and purpose so browsers and assistive technologies can understand the structure and behaviour of a page.
Session
A session is a group of interactions that an analytics platform associates with one period of activity on a website or application.
Shipping Zone
A shipping zone is a geographic area used by an e-commerce system to determine which shipping or delivery methods and rates apply to a customer's order.
Shopping Cart
A shopping cart temporarily stores the products, variants, quantities, and other purchasing information a customer intends to take into checkout.
Single Point of Failure
A single point of failure is one person, account, system, or component whose loss or failure can prevent an important service from continuing.
Site Hierarchy
Site hierarchy is the system of parent-and-child relationships used to organize broad and increasingly specific areas of a website.
Skip Link
A skip link lets users bypass repeated page content and move directly to an important region such as the main content.
SKU
A SKU is a business-defined unique identifier used to distinguish and track a specific product or product variant.
Staging Environment
A staging environment is a non-production version of a website used to test changes in conditions that resemble the live website before deployment.
Structured Content
Structured content is information stored in defined fields and relationships so it can be managed, reused, and presented independently from one specific page layout.
Structured Data
Structured data is standardized machine-readable information used to describe the entities, properties, and relationships represented on a web page.
Subdomain
A subdomain is a domain name created beneath another domain and can be used to route different services or parts of a website independently.
System Behaviour
How a website performs as a whole, based on how its components interact across real users, conditions, and usage.
Taxonomy
A taxonomy is a controlled classification system used to group and describe content according to shared characteristics.
Technical Debt
Technical debt describes technical conditions or short-term decisions that make future changes more difficult, risky, or expensive.
Technical Documentation
Technical documentation records the information needed to understand, operate, maintain, recover, or change a website and its supporting systems.
Technical SEO
Technical SEO focuses on the technical systems and signals that help search engines discover, crawl, understand, and index a website.
Template
A template is a reusable layout and presentation structure used to display a particular kind of page or content consistently.
Theme
A theme is a CMS presentation package that controls the visual design, templates, styles, and other front-end aspects of a website.
Third-Party Script
A third-party script is JavaScript provided or controlled by an external service and embedded into a website to provide additional functionality.
Time to First Byte (TTFB)
Measures how long it takes for a server to begin responding after a page request.
Time to Live (TTL)
DNS Time to Live is the value that tells resolvers how long a DNS answer may be cached before it should be checked again.
TLS Certificate
A TLS certificate is a digital certificate used to authenticate a website's domain and establish trusted encrypted communication over TLS.
Token
A token is a unit of information used by a language model to represent and process its input and generated output.
Tool Use / Function Calling
Tool use or function calling allows an AI model to request defined external functions that retrieve information or perform actions outside the model itself.
Top-Level Domain (TLD)
A top-level domain is the final and highest-level portion of a domain name, such as `.com`, `.org`, or `.ca`.
Traffic Source
A traffic source describes the channel, platform, website, campaign, or other origin associated with a website visit.
TXT Record
A TXT record stores text-based information in DNS and is commonly used for verification, email authentication, and service configuration.
Uptime Monitoring
Uptime monitoring automatically checks whether a website or service remains reachable and alerts responsible people when availability problems are detected.
URL Structure
URL structure describes the naming and organizational patterns used for website addresses.
User
A user is an analytics-system representation of a person or device and should not automatically be interpreted as an exact count of individual people.
User Roles & Permissions
User roles and permissions control which CMS users can perform specific editorial, publishing, configuration, and administrative actions.
UTM Parameter
A UTM parameter is information added to a URL to identify the campaign, source, medium, or other marketing context associated with a visit.
Vector Database
A vector database is a data system designed to store and search numerical vector representations such as embeddings for similarity and semantic retrieval.