This is the second of a series of posts designed to discuss ways to monitor and improve your blog’s performance.
Once you’ve got your blog’s load time under control, it’s next time to go through and validate your blog’s code. Even if you are using a relatively unmodified WordPress theme that you got from someone else, there is still a good chance that your code won’t meet the web’s current standards. If itdoesn’t meet today’s web standards, it is true that it probably won’t cause your readers any hardship, but it can effect search engine indexing, as well as slow down your blog’s load time.
When it comes to code validation, you will want to first validate your site’s HTML. For this, I use the HTML validator from W3C. You are given the choice to validate by providing the URL of the code, validate by uploading the file from your harddrive, or validate by inputting the code directly into their page. I usually validate by URL and simply type my blog’s URL and let it display any errors that might be found.
You will also want to validate your Stylesheet while you are at it. I use the CSS validator, which is also from W3C. It has the same options as the HTML validator, and when run, will let you know if there are any potential problems with your stylesheet. With the use of this tool, I was easily able to clean out a bunch of code that I wasn’t using out of my site’s stylesheet.
Overall, keeping your code valid is not a huge priority, but it is a good practice to be in every couple months or so.
