Glossary
SEO - Search Engine Optimization - the process of building your website and content to improve visibility for your organization on search engines like Google, Bing, etcetera.
Metadata - "Metadata is data that provides information about other data."
- Metadata for a page affects how the page appears on Google searches, bookmarking sites, and social media.
- Metadata includes the page title, description, images, page URL, and basic location information (country, state, city), and some metadata specific to social media.
- Note: The keywords metadata tag is no longer used by Google. It was a single metadata tag, many other metadata tags exist and can still be used.
First Contentful Paint (FCP) - the measure (in seconds) of how long it takes for the browser to render the first piece of DOM content after a user navigates to the page. Anything inside of an iframe is not considered part of the DOM.
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) - the measure (in seconds) of how long it takes for the largest content element to render in the viewport, or the approximate amount of time it takes for the main content to render.
Total Blocking Time - the measure of the total amount of time (in milliseconds) a page is blocked from responding to user input or actions (clicks, taps, keyboard presses).
Speed Index - how quickly content displays during a page load
PXL - a service Terminalfour (T4) provides that optimizes image files by offloading image processing to the cloud. Filters are created by T4 admins for file compression, automatic sizing, or styling purposes (grayscale, sepia), and then coded to image fields.
Content Delivery Network (CDN)
- "A geographically distributed group of servers that caches content close to end users"
- CDNs allow for faster page loads, especially for returning visitors
- It depends on the service, but for Virginians, our closest CDN server is typically in Northern Virginia
- In T4:
- PXL images automatically go into the CDN
- Media files that can't have PXL filters attached can go in the CDN - this includes SVGs, videos, PDFs, Word Docs, and Excel Spreadsheets