John Kavanagh : Indie Web Developer

Although this tip can (and should) be used for your normal website development as well, it is particularly relevant for WordPress websites where you’ve quite possibly paid for the theme you’re using and spent hours writing some of your plugins.

In a default WordPress installation directory listing is not protected, which means that anybody who knows you’re using WordPress can very easily gain access to your themes and plugins as shown in the screenshot below just using their internet browser and appending /wp-content/plugins/ or /wp-content/themes/ to your URL.

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Over the past couple of years I’ve noticed something about referrals: Google Images is very very valuable in attracting users to your website, and it’s equally much easier to get high rankings in the image search results than it is in native search results. The annoying thing about Google Images however, is the way it simply offers the image up to the viewer in a separate frame, making it easy for visitors to simply steal/view your image directly and leave again, never actually paying any attention to your site and potentially reducing your income if the site is monetised with advertisements, and removing any value to you of the visitor.

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In the never-ending quest to reduce the amount of bandwidth your website uses (both to improve visitor load times and to keep your own overheads as low as possible), one of the simplest and easiest areas for improvement is often overlooked: compress your CSS and JavaScript.

Even just taking out all the erroneous white space can make a huge difference in the final size of the file. Of course, it annoys the hell out of people trying to digg through your code, but I sort of see that as an advantage too..! Of course, compressing your CSS and then having to revert back to an uncompressed version every time you want to make a change and re-compressing it again becomes a bit of a bore very quickly, so why not an automated method that will do it for you? With PHP and htaccess, it’s very, very easy.

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File-size and bandwidth obsessions are not bad qualities to find in a webmaster: bandwidth costs you money, and the longer it takes for someone to download all the bits and pieces that make up your site, the more likely it is that your visitor will give up and leave - especially if your server is already busy serving hundreds of files to somebody else…!

One of the biggest expenses in bandwidth is AJAX libraries: although they’re developed to be relatively compact, and you can minify them easily, a full version of JQuery UI 1.6 will “cost” you and your visitors almost half a megabyte! And the worst thing is, every time that same person goes off to another site which also uses the exact same library as the one of your site, they still have to download it all over again.

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Spam crawlers trawl the internet hopping from page to page, searching for unprotected email addresses in your source code. When they do find one, and even worse: if they do find your email address then you best hope you have good filtering because that email address will be squirrelled away and appear on thousands of spam mailing lists for literally years to come. I recently logged into an email account at HotPop that I abandoned almost five years ago just to discover that it was still being inundated with spam every day, even now.

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