Support Forum

Hi Andy & Mr. Pappa,

It's been a while since I last posted on this forum (which is awesome by the way–and I see that you've fixed the ordering of the meta 'title' for SEO… =)…

Anyway, here are a few suggestion to make the Forum runs faster and loads faster:

1. Try not to use the <img> tag for the images and use the “CSS background-image” instead. I think the cost of 1 UNIQUE image is 1/5 second of loading time (so if you have 5 images that would be +1 second, plus you can save a lot of bandwidth too if your site has high traffic =). To that end, it would be better to use CSS background image for the user images and/or icons, etc.

Here is the site that can test the loading speed of your web page: http://www.websiteoptimization.....s/analyze/

2. If you must use <img> tag, try to use it via only one/same image, which looks like you've done with the 'blue backgroun' button for this forum ;).

3. Additionally, it would also help to ONLY call all the forum's require javascripts and css file ONLY on the forum's pages and not throughout the blog. (As well, if the javascripts aren't needed in the 'header', add them in the footer of the page with wp_footer hook. In front of my face, I see the clickable “smileys”–presumably javascript? :0).

Anyhow, I'm glad you still manage to keep up the development of this forum plugin.

P.S. I didn't put any SEO suggestion yet… but it would be an awesome addition to take the first 150 characters of the forum thread post and use it as the “meta-description” for the thread page (only text=>strip out the html =).