Something that goes without saying is that the load time of a page is important. Google takes load time into consideration with it’s indexing algorithems. It’s not as big of a consideration as say, relevance, but it matters. In the grand scheme of things, what do a few seconds matter? Turns out they could matter quite a lot.
Moving all of your JavaScript files to the footer to delay parsing is a good way to speed up the render time of your website. If you want to speed it up even further you can load the scripts asynchronously so that the page load itself isn’t dependent on your scripts having been downloaded and cached at all.
Whenever I’ve left a website to a client for an extended period of time I feel the need to update the files in my repository to make sure it’s up to date. Before you replace the files in trunk with the files from the server it’s essential that you get rid of those pesky .svn system folders that will have been pushed to the production server when the site was deployed.
This is a little outside my standard realm of topics but you never know who might need it. I run a Minecraft server and with the constant updates lately I’ve noted my process to make a little easier for me not to miss a step in the process. If it helps someone else out there, you’re welcome.
If you’re into WordPress development, at some point, you’ll need to customize a query. I love WP_Query for this, it’s my default choice. During the development of this new theme, though, I ran into an issue. Turns out, pagination only works on the default query variable, $wp_query.