Website Optimization Measures, Part I
Published on FebĀ 10, 2008 (updated FebĀ 5, 2024), filed under development (feed). (Share this on Mastodon orĀ Bluesky?)
This and many other posts are also available as a pretty, well-behaved ebook: On Web Development. And speaking of which, hereās a short treatise just about managing the quality of websites: The Little Book of Website Quality Control (updated).
Focus on QA requires occasional website reviews, not necessarily immediate redesigns or relaunches. This week I spent some time analyzing, refactoring, and optimizing my personal sites. I thought to share a few things for inspiration and discussion:
Removing irrelevant posts. I did indeed browse this blog for irrelevant postsāand found a few. While some might consider deleting posts ātaboo,ā I do not, if the posts in question decrease the average post quality. I accept that not every post needs to make #1 on Digg, but admittedly, some entries looked like I babbled in order to say something. The removal has made maintenance a little easier (apart from the fact that I will need to remove a few redirects in the future). It didnāt affect many comments; few people commented on those posts, unsurprisingly. Thereās no downside removing irrelevant stuff, not even in blogs.
Editing and removing comments. Some might consider this another taboo but it has a few good reasons, too, some of them mentioned in the new comment guidelines. The most important reason was spam, and my tolerant approach to comments that avoids both moderation and
nofollow
bears a larger risk of getting spammed without noticing (and that despite I check everything Akismet does, and what gets published). So I went through all comments, removed some, edited or āneutralizedā others. While this measure meant a lot of work it increased this blogās overall quality, and decreased the likelihood of getting āpenalized.ā It benefits commenters in that it emphasizes and strengthens everyoneās contributions.Cleaning up the folder structure for āauxiliaryā files. For style sheets, scripts, and images I personally used to use a folder structure like ā/bin/cssā, ā/bin/jsā, and ā/imgā. Not anymore. The mentioned structure has been inspired by UNIX but only makes so much sense, and it doesnāt scale well, either. So I changed the architecture to
- /media
- /setup
- /css
- /js
And while this appears to be much better than the former type of organization, Iāll watch how it behavesāso far, it works and scales great. ā/mediaā is not just for images and thus gives me the flexibility to throw in videos as well (something I didnāt do before, not in my private projects), and ā/setupā looked like a short name that would roughly legitimate hosting style sheets and the like. Anyway, if thereās something better, Iāll revise it again. Unless cost of problem gets too low, that is.
Revising use of
rel="alternate"
. I used to add<link rel="alternate">
elements in thehead
section of documents to point to alternative versions (mostly translations) of the corresponding page. I dropped this, not due to eventual SEO advantages but for maintainability reasons. Addingrel="alternate"
only to hyperlinks pointing to alternative versions now needs to suffice.Replacing Google and Yahoo verification
meta
elements by HTML equivalents. Using both Google Webmaster Tools and Yahoo Site Explorer I once decided to use themeta
element verification way in order to avoid additional stuff in the corresponding project roots. However, I noticed this had a downside, namely forcing homepage visitors to download these (for them useless) elements. By removing themeta
elements and verifying sites with the alternative HTML documents, file size decreased again, and that is great.
As Iāll be leaving Bremen tomorrow for a few days of home search in Zurich and my next farewell tour in Berlin, I had to hurry and keep some arguments and explanations a little short. At least four additional measures are waiting in part II, however.Ā š
This is a part of an open article series. Check out some of the other posts!
About Me
Iām Jens (long: Jens Oliver Meiert), and Iām a web developer, manager, and author. Iāve worked as a technical lead and engineering manager for small and large enterprises, Iām an occasional contributor to web standards (like HTML, CSS, WCAG), and I write and review books for OāReilly and Frontend Dogma.
I love trying things, not only in web development and engineering management, but also in other areas like philosophy. Here on meiert.com I share some of my experiences and views. (I value you being critical, interpreting charitably, and giving feedback.)