Its a nice long and informative article, and worth a look if you’re looking to do some performance optimization of web site. (Be sure to look into sprites after you’ve switched to loading JavaScript asynchronously!)

Thinking Async [CSS-Tricks]

Page Speed Service is an online service to automatically speed up loading of your web pages. Page Speed Service fetches content from your servers, rewrites your pages by applying web performance best practices and serves them to end users via Google’s servers across the globe.

This is targeted mainly at people running small to medium sized websites, such as WordPress blogs, on shared hosting. The service takes the load off your server, so you don’t have to worry about it running slowly or going down from traffic.

Page Speed Service is currently in a trial period, where it’s free for anyone who wants to use it, but it may end up costing more in the future.

It will be interesting to see how this competes with CloudFlare, which offers more features and a free plan that is more than sufficient for most users. (You can pay $20/month for extra analytics and some more advanced features.) CloudFlare isn’t just trying to speed your site up, though. They also want to help protect it from DDoS attacks, email harvesting, and other unpleasantness. It already has quite a bit of traction.

Non-blocking loading is the key to fast pages. Moreover Head JS loads scripts in parallel no matter how many of them and what the browser is. The speed difference can be dramatic especially on the initial page load when the scripts are not yet in cache. It’s your crucial first impression.

If you have a JavaScript-heavy website, it’s worth taking a look at. If you take a look at the demo pages they have set up, the page that uses Head JS to load the scripts definitely displays much faster.

Head JS :: The only script in your HEAD [Head JS]

• Caching using WP Super Cache
• MySQL Caching
• Checking plugins for slowdowns
• Optimizing tables

If you ever experienced slow WordPress admin panel, “MySQL server has gone away” message, pages taking forever to load or you want to prepare your site for a major increase in traffic (for example Digg front page) this is the guide for you.

It’s not an all-encompasing guide, of course. There are plenty of little tweaks you can do that can shave precious milliseconds off your loading times, such as cutting out unnecessary template tags, such as bloginfo() tags, and replacing them with the values they output.

And of course there are plenty of other things to tweak. PHP, Apache, and MySQL can all be configured carefully for maximum speed, assuming you have root access to your server. You can optimize your templates to decrease loading and rendering times. Yahoo has a few tips.

Performance optimization is always a good idea, especially if your blog is on a shared hosting account, or if you have a very high traffic blog (I’m talking to you, TechCrunch and Mashable!).

Website Optimization is worth a read if you’re trying to get more from your website. The book covers several aspects of optimization. Search engines, loading times, conversion rates, and a little bit on accessibility. There is a heavy emphasis on Search Engine Optimization of course.

It’s a pretty good book, and is very informative, but I have to disagree with some of the SEO advice. The book seems to promote the idea of being stingy when linking to external sites, in an effort to hoard PageRank, linking reciprocally, and making use of the nofollow attribute excessively. Then the book goes and tells you that blogs are a good way to get more inbound links.

I can tell you that an attitude like that regarding links will get you nowere fast. If you want to get links, you must give them first. Link to things that you think will be of interest to your users. The sites you link to will then learn about your site when they find some traffic coming in from your site. Nofollow shouldn’t be used to cripple links you place on your site either. It should be for things like blog commenters’ posted URL’s, which weren’t added by you, and therefore you may not want to recieve PageRank points. As for reciprocal linking, don’t bother. Google thinks reciprocal linking schemes are generally of little interest to the end user, and are therefore discounted when ranking pages.

Other than my minor complaints about some of the linking advice given, it’s a pretty good book.

1. SEO Maniacs – They’re obsessed with improving their PageRank, and driving up their rankings using any means possible. A.K.A. John Chow before Google caught-on.
2. The SEO Disinclined – The sort who just blog and ignore the SEO aspect.
3. The SEO Neutral – Serious bloggers who do a little SEO, but don’t focus on it that much.

No matter which group you fall into, consider implementing the following tips.

• Use h2 tags for your post titles – Search engines like heading tags; the lower numbered the better. Use h2 tags for post titles, and h3s for sections inside your posts.
• Make your post titles into links – On archive pages, and on permalink pages, make your post titles link to the permalink page. Think about it. You have an h2 tag, which search engines place a high value on, with keywords relevant to the post, enclosed in a link pointing to the post. If you’ve heard of Google Bombing before, then you’ll realize the significance of this fairly quick.
• Optimize Page Titles – Your title tag should contain more than just your blog’s name. It’s contents are valued greatly by most major search engines, and it’s a great place to throw-in some keywords. Try this format: “My Cool Post – TheBlog.” Your average post title probably has good keywords relevant to your post, right? For your index page, you want something like the name of your blog, and either your tagline or just a list of keywords that relate to your site.
• Change Your Permalink Structure – If you use WordPress, don’t use the default permalink style! Pick the best option for your purposes, and stick with it. The default ?p=37 permalinks will always redirect to the ones you specifically set.
• Optimize Post Slugs – Many blogging scripts, such as WordPress, offer a “Post Slug” feature that allows you to tweak the URL of the post. By default permalink URLs are somewhere along the lines of “/2008/02/01/name-of-post/.” Using the Post Slug function, you can change “name-of-post” to something better, SEO-wise. This is useful for times when your post title has a lot of extraneous words like “of”, “the”, and the like.
• Use Meta Tags – While meta tags don’t have as much value placed on them as they used to, there still is some, and it’s a good idea to use them.
• ALT and Link Your Logo – Make sure your logo links to your blog’s homepage. This is more of a usability thing than SEO advice, but it’s still a good idea. On a SEO note, make sure you use an “alt” tag on the image, adding something such as the blog’s name to it.

The internet seems to be a parallel reality where time passes differently, slow at times, fast at others. Web pages seem to take eons to load, no matter how fast your internet connection is. I remember having to wait more than a minute for most pages to load (that was back when I had dial-up). Nowadays I have a DSL connection that generally runs in the 700k-900k range. It’s a lot faster, but not fast enough. Sure, some pages load lightning-fast, but others still seem to crawl along. While they’re not taking over a minute to load, it sure seems like it.

While you’re using the web, time flies by overly quick. It seemed like it was taking an hour for that video to load, but it was really only five minutes. So why is it four o’clock? Oh yeah, you logged-on to World of Warcraft for a few minutes… But how does that come-out to be an hour?

Do you get what I’m saying?

So what can you do to make your blog load faster?

• Install WP Super Cache. You’ll notice the difference immediately. While it won’t magically make every page load faster, it will make your more popular posts quicker.
• Pick a Faster Host. If your webhost has a slow connection, and horribly oversold servers, you can’t expect great performance out of your site. I’m currently getting by with a 1and1 shared server plan, which is okay (and cheap), but not as fast as it could be. Michael of Pro Blog Design uses Media Temple, a pricier host that is held in high regard by bloggers everywhere. MT is known for their speed and reliability. For those looking for cheaper plans, I’ve also heard hood things about A Small Orange. Do your research before buying hosting. Check loading times for sites that use the host, look for current reviews (from reputable sources), etc
• Lighten your images. Use less images in your template if possible, and make sure you optimize them correctly.
• Compress your CSS. Use a CSS-optimization service like Clean CSS, or CSS Optimizer. Make sure you save the original stylesheet, in case something goes wrong!
• Remove excess widgets and whatnot. Any extra files (JavaScript or otherwise) that must be loaded will cause a performance hit. If a bit of JavaScript doesn’t serve any purpose, then remove it. does “MyBlogLog” benefit your readers? I doubt it. Refer to this chart for help deciding what to keep.
• Disable plugins. As with miscellaneous bits of JavaScript, plugins detract from performance as well. There’s the overhead from running the PHP commands, there’s MySQL access times, etc. If you don’t have a good reason to use it, then toss it.
• Kill unnecessary template tags. Don’t waste server resources by using bloginfo(‘name’) when you can just write the name of your blog. See Pro Blog Design’s 13 Tags to Delete From your Theme.
• Simplify your design. Go simplistic, and your blog will load faster. As of this writing, Webmaster-Source’s overall design only has two images. The logo, and the tiled edge graphic. Everything else is just CSS magic. The aforementioned ProBlogDesign.com takes a similar approach.

Now that you’ve optimized your blog, you can use the time you will save waiting for your blog to load every day to play World of Warcraft, er, write more blog posts.

So how should you place your AdSense blocks? The three most important rules to remember are

• Pick a good ad format, as they tend to have different click rates.
• Position the ads near content or navigational elements, where people will notice them.
• Style the ads so they blend-in. If your ads are obviously ads, your users’ eyes will steer around them. If your blog has black text with blue links, then your ads should too.

Of course, there’s more to it than that.

Ad Formats

The top performing ad units are

• The square/rectangle units. The wider ones tend to perform better, though your choices may be limited depending on where you want to place them.
• The 160×600 “Wide Skyscraper” doesn’t tend to perform as well as the rectangle/square units, but it works well if you have a good spot to put it.
• I’ve also had good experiences with the 468×60 banner format, though others don’t always have as good of luck. If you find a good place to put it, then it can work well.

“Wider ads perform better” is commonly head among AdSense users, though placement is more important than the ad unit. Yes, wider ads often perform better, though if you place them somewhere stupid (or style them so they stand out too much), they won’t do very well at all.

Ad Placement

The real trick to making your ads perform well is to find a good place for your ads, and an ad format that will work there. The AdSense heatmap may help you out here. You want to place your ads near content in a spot that’s both noticeable, yet not to noticeable. Confused? Everyone is! You need to place ads prominently, but if they’re too noticeable then people will ignore them. Also, the ads tend to work far better on post pages then on the blog index. Ads on the home page tend to have trouble picking-out keywords because of the frequent content changes. Put the ads on your post pages, and save your users the annoyance of having them on the index. Here are a few placement methods that seem to work well:

Ads floated in with your content work great. Using a DIV floated to one side, the content will wrap around the ad unit. Just add a little padding so your content (especially lists) don’t end up too close (or underneath) the ad unit.

Also, 468×60 banners work well between post titles and the post content, and they have the advantage of not crowding your content, unlike floated ads.

The area after the post has also been proven to be a good spot for ads, as the users have finished reading your post and are looking for something else to do. By the way, please don’t put big “large rectangle” ads between paragraphs in your posts. It annoys the heck out of most people.

Ad Styling

Here’s one of the most important things to know about AdSense: Your ads should blend-in with your content. As it says on the official AdSense blog, making your ads blend with your content can seriously improve your ad revenues. As I said earlier, if you have a white page background, black text, and blue links, then your ads had better look like that too!