Glossary
Digital project terms, plainly defined
922 terms in 11 topics: the words that come up when we plan, build and grow websites, stores and digital products with clients. Each definition links to the service or article where we cover it in depth.
Starting a project
Strategy, discovery, scope, MVP, build vs buy and digital ownership: the decisions made before money goes into design or code.
Development
Platforms, apps, architecture, testing, legacy upgrades, hosting and security in plain words.
Apps, SaaS and business software
- Web application
- Client portal
- Admin panel (back office)
- SaaS (software as a service)
- Custom software
- Off-the-shelf software
- Salesforce
- HubSpot
- Odoo
- Microsoft Dynamics 365
- 1C
- Business process automation
- Progressive web app (PWA)
- Push notifications
- Native mobile app
- Cross-platform app (Flutter)
- App Store review
- Backend for frontend (BFF)
Architecture, data and integrations
- Digital architecture
- Business logic
- Domain model
- Modular architecture
- Service layer
- Database schema design
- Database migrations
- ORM (object-relational mapping)
- N+1 query problem
- Queues and background jobs
- Scheduled tasks (cron jobs)
- API
- API versioning
- System integration
- Integration layer
- One-way and two-way integration
- Source of truth (system of record)
- Data migration
- Parallel run and cutover
Testing, releases and documentation
- QA testing
- Automated testing
- Regression testing
- Cross-browser testing
- User acceptance testing (UAT)
- Load testing
- Code review
- CI/CD pipeline
- Staging environment
- Rollback plan
- Git repository (version control)
- Technical documentation
- AGENTS.md
- Handover package
- Production-ready software
- Vibe coding
- Boilerplate code
- Refactoring
Hosting, infrastructure and performance
- DevOps
- Hosting
- Cloud hosting (AWS, Google Cloud)
- Docker and Kubernetes
- Infrastructure as code (Terraform)
- Hosting migration
- Domain, registrar and DNS
- SSL certificate
- CDN (content delivery network)
- Backups and restore tests
- Disaster recovery
- Monitoring and observability
- Website maintenance and support
- Email deliverability (SPF, DKIM)
- HTTP 403 and 429 errors
- Environment variables (.env)
- Page speed (PageSpeed Insights)
- OPcache
- Caching
- Lazy loading
- Responsive images (WebP, AVIF)
E-commerce
Store search and filters, catalog data, B2B pricing, orders, platforms and AI shopping.
Search, filters and product discovery
- Product discovery (e-commerce)
- Site search (store search)
- Faceted navigation
- Faceted search
- Facet (filter attribute)
- Facet counts
- Dependent filters (attribute dependencies)
- Multi-select filter
- Filter landing page (indexable filter page)
- Zero results (empty search or filter)
- Zero-results search log
- Synonym dictionary (search synonyms)
- Did you mean (typo tolerance)
- Keyboard layout correction
- Autocomplete (search suggestions)
- Semantic search
- Search ranking and boosting
- Elasticsearch (dedicated search engine)
- Product compatibility (fitment)
- Multi-attribute matching
- Guided selection (guided selling)
- Product configurator
- Product comparison
- Product recommendations and personalization
Product pages and selling
- Product page (product card, PDP)
- Product reviews
- Product Q&A
- Cross-selling (related products)
- Upselling
- Product bundle (curated set)
- Considered purchase
- Price on request (price on application)
- Artificial urgency and scarcity
- 360-degree product view
- Luxury e-commerce
- Online-to-offline (O2O)
- Clienteling
- Catalog website (catalog without checkout)
Checkout, orders and inventory
- Checkout
- Cart abandonment
- Payment gateway
- Multi-currency checkout
- OMS (order management system)
- Order routing
- Returns (by channel)
- Click and collect (in-store pick-up)
- Made-to-measure (custom) order
- Inventory management
- Inventory synchronization
- Overselling and stock reservation
- Multi-warehouse inventory
- Out-of-stock and discontinued products
- ERP
- CRM
- POS (point of sale)
Platforms and architecture
- Hosted (SaaS) e-commerce platform
- Shopify
- Shopify Plus
- Shopify Markets
- Shopify B2B
- Shopify Functions
- Shopify checkout extensibility
- Liquid and Online Store 2.0 (Shopify themes)
- Hydrogen (Shopify headless)
- Shopify Payments and Shop Pay
- App sprawl (app dependency)
- Magento (Adobe Commerce)
- Hyvä (Magento theme)
- WooCommerce
- OpenCart
- Custom e-commerce platform (Laravel)
- Headless commerce
- Composable commerce
- Replatforming
Channels, feeds, AI shopping and metrics
- Multichannel e-commerce
- Multi-country e-commerce
- DTC (direct-to-consumer)
- Dropshipping
- Marketplace
- Product feed
- Google Merchant Center
- Google Shopping Graph
- Agentic commerce
- ACP (Agentic Commerce Protocol)
- UCP (Universal Commerce Protocol)
- Social commerce (TikTok Shop)
- Digital retailing (automotive)
- AOV (average order value)
- Repeat purchase rate
- Subscription commerce (autoship)
AI in business
Models, agents, retrieval, governance and the road from an AI pilot to production.
AI agents and assistants
- AI agent
- Agentic AI
- Tool calling
- AI orchestration (orchestration layer)
- Multi-agent system
- AI website assistant
- Chatbot (scripted vs generative)
- Human handoff
- AI lead qualification
- AI shopping agent
- Instant Checkout (ChatGPT)
- Intent-driven interface
- AI personalization
- Delegated cognition
- AI call summary
- AI translation workflow
Governance, security and risk
- Agentic AI compliance
- AI governance
- EU AI Act
- Control plane for AI agents
- Policy engine
- Least agency
- Goal hijacking (prompt injection)
- Memory and context poisoning
- Cascading failure (AI agents)
- Human in the loop
- Reversibility of agent actions
- AI audit trail
- Agent maturity model
- Model, agent and system risk
- Failure testing of AI agents
SEO, AEO and GEO
Technical SEO, content, links, local and international search, migrations and visibility in AI answers.
Technical SEO: crawling, indexing and speed
- Technical SEO
- SEO audit
- Search crawler (bot)
- Crawl budget
- Indexing
- robots.txt
- Noindex
- Canonical URL (rel=canonical)
- Duplicate content
- Keyword cannibalization
- Thin content
- Index bloat (filter URL explosion)
- SEO filter landing pages
- URL structure
- URL normalization
- JavaScript SEO (rendering)
- Cloaking
- XML sitemap
- 404 error, 410 and soft 404
- Server log analysis
- IndexNow
- Core Web Vitals
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
- Interaction to Next Paint (INP)
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
On-page SEO and content
- Title tag
- Meta description
- Headings (H1, H2, H3)
- Image alt text
- Internal linking
- Orphan page
- Breadcrumbs
- Topic cluster (pillar page)
- Topical authority
- SEO copywriting
- Category SEO text
- Unique product descriptions
- User-generated content (UGC)
- Content freshness
- Original content (first-hand expertise)
- AI-generated content
- Buying guide
- Content audit
- Content debt
AI search and structured data
- AEO (answer engine optimization)
- GEO (generative engine optimization)
- Answer engine
- Google AI Overviews and AI Mode
- Answer-first content
- AEO and GEO audit (AI visibility audit)
- AI share of voice
- Entity (in search and AI)
- llms.txt
- AI crawlers
- Bing Webmaster Tools
- Multimodal search
- Structured data (schema markup)
- JSON-LD
- Rich results
- FAQ schema (FAQPage markup)
- Product and Offer markup
Analytics and metrics
KPIs, CAC and LTV, behaviour analytics, tracking and attribution, Google Analytics and Search Console.
Metrics and KPIs
- KPI (key performance indicator)
- Conversion rate
- Qualified lead (MQL)
- Lead-to-sale conversion (close rate)
- Customer acquisition cost (CAC)
- Customer lifetime value (LTV)
- Vanity metrics
- Bounce rate
- Engaged session
- Average session duration (time on site)
- Organic CTR
- Activation metric
- Cohort analysis
- Traffic concentration
- Containment rate
- Seasonality (year-over-year comparison)
- Correlation vs causation
UX/UI and web design
Research, wireframes, design systems, usability, accessibility and multilingual design in plain words.
Visual design and UI
- Design system
- Design tokens
- Design system debt (design drift)
- Visual hierarchy
- F-pattern and Z-pattern
- Typography
- Variable fonts
- Whitespace (negative space)
- Minimalism in design
- Accent colour
- Above the fold (first screen)
- Hero section
- Dark mode
- Stock photography
- Art direction
- Moodboard
- Aesthetic-usability effect (halo effect)
- First impression (50 milliseconds)
Accessibility, mobile and languages
- Web accessibility
- WCAG 2.2
- ADA website compliance
- Colour contrast ratio
- Alt text
- Accessible authentication (WCAG 2.2)
- Touch target size
- Reduced motion
- Mobile-first design
- Responsive design (breakpoints)
- Click-to-call
- Burger menu
- Platform guidelines (iOS and Material Design)
- Multilingual website
- Language switcher
- RTL layout (right to left)
- Text expansion
- Script-specific typography (Cyrillic, Arabic)
- Cultural adaptation of design
Brand
Brand strategy, positioning, identity, voice and rebranding, plus luxury and heritage brands.
Advertising and social media
Paid ads on Meta, Google, TikTok and ChatGPT, ad metrics and tracking, and social media marketing from strategy to community.
Campaign structure and the learning phase
- Campaign objective
- Advantage+ campaign budget (CBO)
- Ad set budget (ABO)
- Ad set budget sharing
- Testing vs scaling campaigns (test in ABO, scale in CBO)
- Learning phase
- Learning Limited
- Significant edit
- Optimization event (conversion event)
- Budget fragmentation
- Budget scaling
- Bid strategy
- Value-based bidding (profit, new customers)
Audiences and creatives
- Advantage+ audience (broad targeting)
- Custom audience
- Lookalike audience
- Retargeting (remarketing)
- Cold, warm and hot audiences
- Audience overlap
- Audience fatigue (saturation)
- Audience drift
- Geo-targeting
- Ad placements
- Paid social specialist (targetologist)
- Ad creative
- Creative fatigue
- Creative testing
- Hook (first seconds of an ad)
- UGC-style ads
- Vertical video (9:16)
- Message match
- Meta Lead Ads (instant forms)
Ad metrics and tracking
- CTR (click-through rate)
- CPC (cost per click)
- CPM (cost per mille)
- CPA (cost per action, target CPA)
- Cost per result
- Cost per lead (CPL)
- ROAS (return on ad spend)
- Break-even ROAS
- Frequency
- Quality Score and Ad Rank
- Auction Insights (impression share)
- Incrementality (holdout test)
- Meta Pixel
- Conversions API (CAPI)
- Event deduplication
- Events Manager
- Enhanced Conversions (Google)
- iOS 14.5 App Tracking Transparency (ATT)
Social media strategy and content
- SMM (social media marketing)
- Social media strategy
- Social media management
- Social media audit
- Target audience (audience definition)
- Social media goals and KPIs
- Platform selection
- Content pillars
- Content plan (content calendar)
- Posting frequency
- Social media funnel
- Lead magnet
- Comment-to-DM automation
- Paid amplification (paid social)
- Short-form video (Reels)
- Content batching
- Cross-posting
- Content fatigue
- Owned channels
Reach, algorithms and community
- Organic reach
- Engagement rate (ER)
- Ranking signals (watch time, saves, shares)
- Recommendation algorithm (discovery feed)
- Social search
- Follower quality (ghost followers)
- Hashtag strategy
- Shadowban
- Brand safety
- DAU and MAU (daily and monthly active users)
- Community management
- Brand community (community vs audience)
- Influencer marketing
- Nano and micro influencers
- Creator collaboration program
- De-influencing
Working with a team
Engagement models, pricing and contracts, hiring, roles and everyday process with an outside team.
Business, finance and M&A
Operations, sales, unit economics, valuation, M&A, exit and the legal terms around them.
Business systems and operations
- Digital transformation (business digitalization)
- Business process automation
- Shadow IT (shadow spreadsheets)
- Data silos
- Single customer record
- Single point of failure
- Business continuity (operational resilience)
- Competitive debt
- Time to market
- Digital ecosystem
- Change management
- Marketing automation
- PLM (product lifecycle management)
- DMS (dealer management system)
- CPQ (configure, price, quote)
- Month-end close
Finance and unit economics
- Unit economics
- Gross margin
- Margin leakage
- ROI (return on investment)
- Opportunity cost (cost of delay)
- Recurring revenue
- ARR and run rate
- MRR (monthly recurring revenue)
- Churn rate
- Net revenue retention (NRR)
- Rule of 40
- EBITDA
- Payment terms (Net 30)
- GMV (gross merchandise value)
- Capital raise (Series A)
- Cap table
- Term sheet
- SAFE
- Post-money valuation
- Dilution
- Lead investor
- Burn rate
- Runway
- TAM, SAM, SOM
M&A and due diligence
- Mergers and acquisitions (M&A)
- Due diligence
- Sell-side due diligence
- Digital due diligence
- AI due diligence
- Data room
- Data request list
- CIM (confidential information memorandum)
- Teaser
- Pitch deck
- Management presentation
- Indication of interest (IOI)
- Letter of intent (LOI)
- Add-backs
- Buyer universe
- Acquisition thesis
- Strategic buyer
- Financial buyer (financial sponsor)
- Roll-up (consolidator)
- Synergies
- Acquisition premium
- Rebuild cost (replacement cost)
- Underwriting (in M&A)
- Earn-out
- Representations and warranties
- Disclosure schedule
- Fair disclosure
- Sandbagging
- Escrow
- Rollover equity
- Post-acquisition integration
- Transition service agreement (TSA)
- Carve-out
- Clean team
- Redaction
- Gun jumping
- Compromise assessment
- Cutover
- Investment banker (M&A advisor)
- Business broker
Exit and succession
- Exit planning (exit readiness)
- Business succession
- Management buyout (MBO)
- Seller financing
- Employee ownership
- ESOP (employee stock ownership plan)
- Buy-sell agreement
- Family charter (family constitution)
- Three-circle model
- Key-person dependency (founder dependency)
- Bus factor
- 90-day test
- Management depth
- Transferability (documented processes)
- Standard operating procedure (SOP)
- Tacit knowledge
- Sale narrative
Legal, IP and compliance
- Intellectual property (IP) ownership
- IP assignment agreement
- Software license
- NDA (non-disclosure agreement)
- Data minimisation
- Trademark
- Utility patent
- HIPAA and tracking pixels
- Washington My Health My Data Act
- UAE PDPL (personal data protection law)
- UAE VAT and tax invoice
- E-invoicing
- FTC consumer reviews rule
- Prohibited software list in Ukraine (Resolution 1335)
Glossary
Need a term explained on your own project?
Bring it to a strategic session. In two to three hours we look at your business as a whole and explain, in plain words, what each technical or marketing decision means for it. The session costs $500, credited toward a project started within 30 days.