Plain English
Website words, in plain English
The words web people use, explained without using more of them. Some of these are worth paying for. A few are worth asking about.
The things you actually pay for
- Domain
- Your address on the internet: yourbusiness.co.za. You rent it by the year, about R100 to R150 depending on who you buy it from, and it should be registered in your name — not your web designer’s. If it’s in theirs, you don’t really own your own address.
- Hosting
- The computer your website lives on, so it’s there when somebody visits. Rented monthly. For a small business site it is genuinely cheap; if you’re being quoted hundreds of rand a month, ask what for.
- Email hosting
- A mailbox at your own address — you@yourbusiness.co.za. It’s a separate monthly subscription from the website itself, usually Google Workspace or Microsoft 365, and that provider bills you directly. Almost everyone is surprised by this one.
- Payment gateway
- The service that takes the card payment on your shop and puts the money into your bank account. In South Africa that is usually Yoco or Payfast. They take a percentage of each sale, and the account has to be in your business’s name.
- The build
- The once-off cost of making the site. Everything above is what it costs to keep it running afterwards. A quote that mentions one and not the other is only half a quote.
Words you’ll hear while it’s being built
- CMS
- Content Management System. The thing you log into to change words and photos yourself, without phoning anybody. WordPress is the best known one.
- WordPress
- The most widely used CMS in the world. A lot of cheaper sites are a WordPress install with a bought template on top. It works — but it needs updating regularly, and the add-ons that make it useful are the most common way small sites get hacked.
- Plugin
- An add-on that bolts an extra feature onto a CMS. Handy, and the usual way a site gets broken into. Every one you install is another thing somebody has to keep updated.
- Template (or theme)
- A ready-made design you drop your content into. Cheaper and faster than something built for you. Whether that matters depends on whether you mind looking like everybody else in your trade.
- Responsive
- Means the website rearranges itself to fit a phone screen. Most of your customers are on a phone, so every website needs it.
- Landing page
- A page somebody arrives at straight from an advert, rather than from your home page.
- Above the fold
- The part of the page you can see before you scroll. An old newspaper term. It matters because most people decide whether to stay within about two seconds.
- Staging site
- A private copy of your site where changes get made and checked before the public sees them. It means your live website keeps working normally while changes are being made to it.
Words that turn up in sales pitches
- SSL, HTTPS, "the padlock"
- The padlock next to the address. It encrypts the connection between your visitor and your site. Certificates are free now and take minutes to set up. If somebody is charging you a meaningful amount every year for one, that is worth a question.
- SEO
- Search Engine Optimisation — making it more likely you turn up when somebody searches. The basics are real and worth doing: clear headings, honest page titles, and describing what you do in the words your customers actually use. Nobody can promise you first place on Google, and anyone who does is guessing.
- Google Business Profile
- Your free listing on Google: the map pin, your phone number, your hours and your reviews. For a local trade it often brings in more calls than the website does, and the two work together. Claim it, keep the hours right, and ask customers for reviews.
- Page title and description
- The two lines Google shows in its results: the blue heading and the grey sentence under it. Every page has them, and writing them properly is most of what “meta tags” means when somebody charges you for them.
- Analytics
- Counting visitors. How many came, which pages they read, roughly where they came from. Useful. Not the same thing as knowing who they are.
- Bandwidth (or traffic)
- How much data your site sends out. For a small business site this is almost never a real limit. If a quote makes a lot of it, ask what actually happens if you go over — the honest answer is usually "nothing".
- Uptime
- The percentage of time your site is actually working. 99.9% sounds impressive; it works out at roughly nine hours down a year.
- Backups
- Copies of your site, kept in case something breaks or gets hacked. Ask how often they’re taken, and ask how quickly one can be put back. A backup nobody has ever restored is a guess, not a safety net.
Why things sometimes look wrong
- DNS
- The internet’s phone book — what connects your domain name to the computer your site lives on. When you move hosting, DNS changes take a few hours to spread, which is why a new site sometimes shows up for you and not yet for your neighbour.
- Cache
- A saved copy, kept so things load faster. It is the usual reason you can’t see a change you know was made. Nine times out of ten it sorts itself out; the tenth is a hard refresh.
- Redirect
- A rule that sends one address to another, used when a page moves so old links don’t break. Worth having, and you should never have to think about it.
- 404
- The page you get when the address doesn’t exist. Every site has one. A good one helps you find what you were after; most say only "Not Found" and leave you there.