What actually happens when someone visits your website

The visit, step by step

Someone types arborprostree.com into their phone. Here is the relay race that follows, usually in under a second.

1. Their phone asks "where is arborprostree.com?" Nothing on the internet knows where a website lives by name. Every visit starts with a lookup, like asking directory enquiries for a phone number.
2. GoDaddy is the registrar — it owns the name, not the site You rent the name arborprostree.com from GoDaddy. Think of them as the county clerk who records that the name is yours. They also hold the instruction for who answers questions about it — and that instruction currently points at Cloudflare.
3. Cloudflare answers the question GoDaddy has handed the answering job to Cloudflare's nameservers (desi.ns.cloudflare.com and jermaine.ns.cloudflare.com). Cloudflare replies with an address — and importantly, it gives out its own address, not your web host's.
4. The visitor's phone connects to Cloudflare, not to your website This is the part that surprises people. Every visitor talks to Cloudflare first. Cloudflare sits in front like a receptionist: it filters out attacks and bad bots, handles the padlock (HTTPS), and decides what to do with the request.
5. Cloudflare decides how to answer It can hand back a ready-made page it is already holding (Pages), run a small piece of code to build a custom answer (Workers), hand over a stored photo or file (R2), or pass the request back to WordPress and relay the answer.
6. WordPress is where the content actually lives Your pages, blog posts and photos are stored in WordPress, hosted by GoDaddy. That is where text gets written and edited. It is the filing cabinet, not the shop front.
7. "Headless" means the filing cabinet and the shop front are separated Content is still written in WordPress, but instead of WordPress building each page for every visitor, we read the content out of it in advance (through something called the REST API — a way for one system to ask another for data) and hand Cloudflare a set of finished pages. Faster for visitors, and the site stays up even if WordPress does not.

Who does what — and where to log in

Each of these is a separate company with a separate login. If something breaks, this tells you whose door to knock on.

How you know where customers came from

Four Google products, in a chain. Each hands something to the next. It is worth knowing the order, because when a number looks wrong, the problem is usually one link back from where you noticed it.

1. Google Tag Manager — the switchboard A single piece of code on the site that decides which trackers fire and when. Nothing else gets installed on the site directly; everything goes through here. Your container is GTM-MD6Q2S6R.
2. Google Analytics 4 — the record keeper Receives what Tag Manager sends and stores it: visits, pages viewed, and the two things that matter most — generate_lead when a form is completed, and phone_click when someone taps the phone number.
3. Google Ads — the spender Runs the paid adverts. Analytics passes completed leads back to Ads so it can learn which clicks turned into actual enquiries, and bid accordingly. Without that feedback loop, Ads is guessing.
4. Search Console — the free-traffic mirror Sits outside the chain. Ads tells you about traffic you paid for; Search Console tells you about traffic you did not — which searches showed your site, how often people clicked, and whether Google is having trouble reading any pages.

Your email — where it lives and what guards it

What Google Workspace is

Google Workspace is Gmail and Google Drive, but running on your own domain name. Instead of something@gmail.com, you get sammy@arborprostree.com. Same familiar Gmail screen; the difference is the name after the @, which is your business rather than Google's.

Where the mail actually lives

On Google's servers. Cloudflare does not store any of your email — it only holds the signpost that tells the rest of the world where to deliver it. That signpost is called an MX record, and yours points at smtp.google.com.

What protects it, and where that protection is configured

Three settings live in Cloudflare's DNS and exist to stop someone forging email that appears to come from your business — a common way of defrauding customers.

Aliases — several addresses, one inbox

Extra names can point at the same mailbox, so mail to any of them lands in the same place without another account to check. Set up so far: Sam, Samuel.Holland, Sammy.Holland, Melinda, Melinda.Holland, Quote, Sales, Info, and Help.

What renews, when, and how often

Only the domain renewal is documented with certainty. The rest is marked honestly as unconfirmed rather than guessed — a wrong renewal date is worse than a missing one.