In the olden days, we still used programming languages. Today, with web design, much of the actual coding can be graphical in nature. For example, creating forms can be a matter of dragging and dropping "fields" onto a screen. You can even tie forms to database calls for simple things, avoiding the need to write SQL.
While you can create basic forms like that, there should be programming calls for security, and certainly any "processing" that occurs. I would venture to guess that the SQL generated should be much more sophisticated and optimzed. Plus, there's also a need to load balance certain parts of the program across servers, to keep the site from crashing.
Don't you program it then compile it to machine language so it will work faster?
For simple websites, you may not require a compiler to translate program code into machine code. You simply "publish" your web pages to a web server. A program like this undoubtedly has a number of programs on the back-end however, communicating with other databases, computing metrics, etc. It's very likely those programs have to be compiled.
But as we used to say in school, "just because the program compiled, doesn't mean it works!"
Of course, all of that is theoretical. Who knows what the actual design of this site is supposed to do?
“just because the program compiled, doesn’t mean it works”
Yeah compiling is like a spell checker for the “words” used in the logic statements; means zero about the accuracy of the computations, data fields, etc.