WordPress Front End Optimizations

WordPress Front-End Optimizations Tips to Speed Up Your Blog Saturday, October 16, 2010

What is the “Front-End”? HTML CSS Images JavaScript Media (Audio/Video) 3rd Party APIs Saturday, October 16, 2010

HTML Markup / Node structure Placement of stylesheets / scripts Images <meta> tags DOCTYPE Micro-formats Saturday, October 16, 2010

CSS Typography Colors reset.css CSS selectors Background Images / CSS Sprites CSS3+ support IE6 / Browser support Saturday, October 16, 2010

JavaScript Event Binding 3rd Party APIs AJAX Form validation DOM traversing jQuery Cookies Page State / Comet / Long-polling Saturday, October 16, 2010

Front-End Programming + WordPress = HTML + CSS + Javascript + Media + PHP + WordPress API Saturday, October 16, 2010

PHP / WordPress API Built-in WordPress Functions WordPress Template Hierarchy WordPress Media Library Database Abstraction Layer WordPress Admin Site-speciﬁc PHP code written by you Saturday, October 16, 2010

HTML Semantic DOCTYPE - speciﬁc Classes vs IDs Accessible Shallow node depth Saturday, October 16, 2010

Node Depth <div> <div> <div> <div> <div> <div>... Saturday, October 16, 2010

Better Node Depth <div class=”wrapper”> <div class=”module”>...</div> <div class=”module”>...</div> <div class=”module”>...</div> </div> Saturday, October 16, 2010

Semantic <h1>The Title</h1> <p>The content, The content, The content, The content, The content, The content, The content, The content, The content.</p> <address> 160 West End Ave New York, NY 10023 </address> Saturday, October 16, 2010

CSS OO approach = classes vs IDs 2 selectors === yay! shorthand properties === fewer bytes No proprietary CSS Use browser hacks sparingly / <body> classes Saturday, October 16, 2010

CSS selectors This works .module p {...} .override p {...} vs This doesn’t #module p {...} .override p {...} Saturday, October 16, 2010

CSS selectors Overrides follow this rule: IDs, Classes, Elements #module .module p = 111 .module .blue p = 21 #wrapper #content span a = 202 Classes make overrides/extending CSS classes a lot easier Saturday, October 16, 2010

JavaScript Know what/who your scripts are! Inspect what your plugins are doing Combine them! use JSLint all the time! Remove unused functions/code Saturday, October 16, 2010

Media Video = OGV + MP4, VideoJS Audio = MP3, JPlayer Images: PNG > GIF JPEG (Pictures) Web Fonts Saturday, October 16, 2010

YSlow! - Highlights Make Fewer HTTP Requests Use a CDN Add an Expires Header Gzip Components Put Stylesheets at the top Put Scripts at the bottom Avoid CSS Expressions Make JS/CSS external Reduce DNS lookups Minify Javascript Avoid Redirects Remove Duplicate Scripts Conﬁgure ETags Make AJAX Cache-able Saturday, October 16, 2010

YSlow! - low-hanging fruit Set Expires headers Add Deﬂate rules Gzip (caching plugin) Reduce number of DOM elements use Favicon Do not scale images/give images dimensions Cache AJAX requests Saturday, October 16, 2010

Expires <FilesMatch “.gif|jpg|css|js”> ExpiresDefault “access plus 10 years” </FilesMatch> Saturday, October 16, 2010

Deﬂate === Gzip AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-javascript Saturday, October 16, 2010

Google Page Speed Remove Unused CSS Avoid document.write Combine CSS/JS Use image sprites Minify JS/CSS/HTML Remove query strings from static resources Specify UTF-8 early use efﬁcient CSS selectors Saturday, October 16, 2010

Sources for info Rasmus Lerdorf session at Digg Douglas Crockford at Yahoo Anything by Steve Souders Google Speed / YSlow Smush.It JSLint for JS / Jigsaw Validator for CSS Thomas Fuchs / DOM Monster bookmarklet Saturday, October 16, 2010

WordPress Front End Optimizations

by Scott Taylor

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