I’m into the whole page speed thing. It’s fun to measure your page speed score, then find new solutions to boost it up. But, I have had my up and downs when it comes to keeping my sites super, duper speedy. I’m pretty obsessed with it. I’m extremely unhappy when my site has been declared as “slow” by Google when I’ve played by all of the page speed rules.

One of the best tools that I have used to measure page speed is the Page Speed extension for Google Chrome. I seem to get the most accurate and consistent results with this tool. There are some things that these tools won’t or can’t tell you. So, I’ve outlines a few things that I’ve done that seem to have delivered results.

Remove rel=”nofollow”

I had to really ask myself how necessary some of the nofollow tags that I had on links were. If you truly want the page ignored by Google, Yahoo, etc, perhaps the information could be moved to a subdomain or a folder that can be blocked with a robots.txt file. After going through and auditing the links that had nofollows on, I decided that they could all be removed. Once removed, I noticed a significant improvement in the consistency of my page speed analysis in Google Webmaster Tools.

Think about it, every time Google bot or some other friendly bot comes along and finds a nofollow, it’s like hitting a brick wall. If it really needs to be secured move it to a subdomain and protect it.

Remove Flash

Flash is great, it’s easy to use and allows you to easily create some stunning graphics and animations. But there are many cons to using Flash. If you’re not careful, it’s easy to get carried away when developing your movies. Files can end up getting bulky and large and cause your site to load slowly. If your using Flash in more than one area of your site, you can really start to build up the overall file size of your web pages.

Removing Flash from a site I was developing and replacing it with javascript and jQuery increased the consistency of my page speed. Not only that, it allowed me to use text that is now visible to search engines instead of text that was embedded within the movie.

If you decide to use Flash, use it sparingly and leave it out of your navigation. There are many great javascript and jQuery plugins that will allow you to make flash like animations. In some cases they are lighter and supported by more users browsers.

Specify your Character Set in .htaccess

Now this is something that the Google Chorme page speed tool will suggest to you but, it can be difficult to implement. Well, not difficult to implement but maddening to implement. Common practice is to define the character set in the head section of each of your web pages like so:

For some reason, once the above line of code was added to my header, the page speed tool would continue to advise me to “Specify a character set”.

I finally found the answer to all of my problems over at askapache.com in the blog post titled “Setting charset in htaccess“. Once the charset was added to my .htaccess file the page speed tool was happy and increased my score by a point or two.

Use Google Analytics Site Speed Report

The site speed report is offered in the new version of Google Analytics and is by default set to off. In order to begin using the report, the default needs to be changed to “On” and your tracking code will need to be altered. Site speed reports can tell you specifically which pages on your site are slowest. You can read more about the site speed report by visiting the Google Analytics Blog.

There are many other things that you can do to increase site speed. What I’ve outlined here are some of the more obscure or otherwise less obvious things that won’t be listed in the suggestions of your page speed reports. I had to to some extra digging and research along with some trial and error before I found effective solutions.