So, thanks to a friend, I’ve started plugging away at my site again to make things run faster, take less bandwidth, and score higher on YSlow and Google Pagespeed (oh, and webpagetest.org, which I’ll get to later).
So, first thing I did was get some baselines. I ran my site through Yslow and Pagespeed again, and got a 84/100 and 94/100 respectively. When looking at Pagespeed, there was really nothing that wrong (or at least, nothing Google was telling me was egregious). Yslow, on the other hand, had a lot to say. The main thing, and something I’d wrestled with before, was CSS and JS minification (combining all of them, stripping out whitespace/comments, and compressing). So, I went back to work on getting that working. Turns out, in the theme I use (the seemingly wildly popular iNove) doesn’t load CSS or JS in the proper way. It would load them with normal HTML, and a PHP call to fill in there location. This is not correct. What SHOULD be done is a wp_enqueue_style or wp_enqueue_script to add the style/script to a queue, so that they can all be added by WordPress. This was preventing WP-Minify (a minifying plugin for WordPress) from intercepting the stylesheets and scripts, and minifying them. So, some hacking of my theme later, and viola! it works.