One of the best tools that I have used to measure page speed is the Page Speed extension for Google Chrome. I seem to get the most accurate and consistent results with this tool. There are some things that these tools won’t or can’t tell you. So, I’ve outlines a few things that I’ve done that seem to have delivered results.

Remove rel=”nofollow”

I had to really ask myself how necessary some of the nofollow tags that I had on links were. If you truly want the page ignored by Google, Yahoo, etc, perhaps the information could be moved to a subdomain or a folder that can be blocked with a robots.txt file. After going through and auditing the links that had nofollows on, I decided that they could all be removed. Once removed, I noticed a significant improvement in the consistency of my page speed analysis in Google Webmaster Tools.

Think about it, every time Google bot or some other friendly bot comes along and finds a nofollow, it’s like hitting a brick wall. If it really needs to be secured move it to a subdomain and protect it.

Remove Flash

Flash is great, it’s easy to use and allows you to easily create some stunning graphics and animations. But there are many cons to using Flash. If you’re not careful, it’s easy to get carried away when developing your movies. Files can end up getting bulky and large and cause your site to load slowly. If your using Flash in more than one area of your site, you can really start to build up the overall file size of your web pages.

Removing Flash from a site I was developing and replacing it with javascript and jQuery increased the consistency of my page speed. Not only that, it allowed me to use text that is now visible to search engines instead of text that was embedded within the movie.

If you decide to use Flash, use it sparingly and leave it out of your navigation. There are many great javascript and jQuery plugins that will allow you to make flash like animations. In some cases they are lighter and supported by more users browsers.

Specify your Character Set in .htaccess

Now this is something that the Google Chorme page speed tool will suggest to you but, it can be difficult to implement. Well, not difficult to implement but maddening to implement. Common practice is to define the character set in the head section of each of your web pages like so:

For some reason, once the above line of code was added to my header, the page speed tool would continue to advise me to “Specify a character set”.

I finally found the answer to all of my problems over at askapache.com in the blog post titled “Setting charset in htaccess“. Once the charset was added to my .htaccess file the page speed tool was happy and increased my score by a point or two.

Use Google Analytics Site Speed Report

The site speed report is offered in the new version of Google Analytics and is by default set to off. In order to begin using the report, the default needs to be changed to “On” and your tracking code will need to be altered. Site speed reports can tell you specifically which pages on your site are slowest. You can read more about the site speed report by visiting the Google Analytics Blog.

There are many other things that you can do to increase site speed. What I’ve outlined here are some of the more obscure or otherwise less obvious things that won’t be listed in the suggestions of your page speed reports. I had to to some extra digging and research along with some trial and error before I found effective solutions.

Building a WordPress Theme

Chris Spooner’s tutorial “How to Build a Custom WordPress Theme from Scratch” is a great place to start for anybody that wants to build there own custom WordPres theme. No previous WordPress experience required. The tutorial outlines all of the important files that need to updated in order for your custom theme to work properly.

His tutorials are easy to follow with easy to understand instructions and great use of imagery. A site that every developer should bookmark.

Building a WordPress Template

Templates are different from Themes in WordPress. You may find that you do not want to use the default theme on a page. You don’t want to link a bunch of unnecessary external javascript or css stylesheets in every page of your site if they are not required. That will really hurt your page speed score.

WordPress Max has posted a great  tutorial titled “How to Create a WordPress Page Template“. Implementing a custom template is as simple as uploading the php file to your site via ftp and choosing the template from the dropdown menu within your WordPress admin panel.

Setting up MAMP for Local Development

CSS-Tricks has posted a couple of great video tutorials for setting up MAMP. “First Moments with MAMP“ is the perfect place to start. Everyone knows the value of working with your site locally but, if you want to work with a CMS like WordPress locally you will need to install MAMP for Mac or XAMPP for Windows. If working in Windows Six Revisions offers a great tutorial titled “Using XAMPP for Local WordPress Theme Development“ that not only gets you started with XAMPP but also shows you how to install WordPress within the XAMPP environment.

CSS & jQuery

I love tools that make my life easier. Border Radius is a handy like tool that allows you to enter the radius for each corner of your box and then spits out the proper CSS for Webkit, Gecko and CSS3.

For my Portfolio page I used a handy little tutorial over at Net Tuts titled “Create a Slick Tabbed Content Area using CSS & jQuery“. I love this technique and have used it a few other times on other sites that I’ve worked on. It’s easy to implement and very light in code. I’ve actually implemented this without using any jQuery just to keep it as light and simple as possible.

The next plugin that I used on the Portfolio page was jQuery Lightbox. I simple to implement plug in that works very well in any picture or image gallery. Highly recommended.

WordPress Plugins

Since getting this site up and running I’ve been concerned about it’s performance. At times it seems painfully slow. I’m unsure if this is because of my host or WordPress. Pagespeed it going to be something that I’ll be adress as I add more to the site. I’ve implemented many pagespeed techniques on other sites that I have worked with but never with a cms like WordPress.

One of the first plugins that I found to address this issue was WP Super Cache. This plug in creates a static copy of each page of your site and presents this to almost all of your visitors. It reduces calls to the database in turn reducing load on your server. It’s great for your visitors but can be annoying if your developing directly on your web server.

Ok, I think that about covers it. Thanks for reading.