Website Optimization Measures, Part II

Published on Feb 15, 2008 (updated Feb 5, 2024), filed under development, optimization. (Share this post, e.g., on Mastodon.)

This and 133 other posts are also available as a well-behaved ebook: On Web Development. And speaking of which, here’s a short treatise just about managing the quality of websites: The Little Book of Website Quality Control (updated).

Now that we talked about blog cleanups, structure and element revisions as well as search engine verification in part I, here are some additional suggestions, small options for improvement consisting of .htaccess stuff, SEO, and consistency checks.

• Sorting .htaccess directives and adding standardized comments. Quick and dirty: I love to be organized, and I discovered some potential within my projects’ .htaccess files. I didn’t add new stuff as many useful directives had already been in place, but I went for alphabetical sorting in certain sections, and these sections themselves have been labeled “metaphorically”:

  # Authentication
  ## Authentication directives
  
  # Startup Routine
  ## Various alphabetically sorted directives, e.g.
  AddCharset utf-8 .css .html .js .txt .xml
  AddDefaultCharset utf-8
  CheckSpelling On
  ContentDigest On
  DefaultLanguage en
  
  # Course Correction
  ## URL rewrite directives
  
  # Course Correction: P1-P3
  ## Redirect and RedirectMatch directives
  
  # Emergency
  ## ErrorDocument directives

• Getting additional assistance with SEO. Sure, this involves actual optimization as well, but I need to thank John Britsios for helping me with a few severe issues first. The main measure that I needed to perform was a robots.txt update that became necessary due to the apparently lousy archive and pagination handling of WordPress—as for the English part of this site, I had about 74% of my pages in the supplemental index (promotion: see more of these tools over at recently face-lifted UITest.com). Way too much, caused by a lot of automatically generated duplicate content. So John analyzed this site and came up with a few tweaks, and I’m both curious and confident about the real outcome within the next weeks and months to come.

• Checking and improving UI and code consistency. There have been many improvements here, but I file them under “consistency efforts.” The lesson I continuously learn from my QA initiative (with many people pointing out mistakes) is likewise continuously learned when checking code. No matter how hard you try, some mistakes always sneak in. So checking both CSS and HTML files revealed a few minor issues, like unnecessary references and support for IE 5 in one project (whose extra code I don’t carry around anymore).

• Considering but dropping hidden file extensions. No wonder I dropped this idea, having wasted too much time with mod_rewrite experiments. Okay, that time wasn’t truly wasted since I learned a lot, but what I ultimately noticed was that hiding file extensions (and the implications for my personal projects) wasn’t worth the effort, and I stopped changing stuff when I suspected this to become a maintenance issue. Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.

That should have been a few more refactoring measures. I hope you enjoyed them—I might write about other optimization efforts again soon for there still are many things to improve. Of course.

This is a part of an open article series. Check out some of the other optimization posts!

About Me

I’m Jens (long: Jens Oliver Meiert), and I’m an engineering lead, guerrilla philosopher, and indie publisher. I’ve worked as a technical lead and engineering manager at various companies (e.g., Google); I’m an active web and tool developer (code optimization, digital defense), a contributor to web standards (like HTML, CSS, WCAG), and a book author (O’Reilly, Frontend Dogma).

I love trying things—in web development and engineering management, but also in politics and philosophy, where I hold to one idea in particular: that we can only be well if we take good care of everyone. Here on meiert.com I talk about some of my perspectives and experiences. (Please share feedback: Interpret charitably, keep it friendly, but do be critical.)