I’m keen to know more as well.
I had my host suspending my website account a couple of days ago because of a high MySQL CPU usage so I got them to allow me to make changes before they kicked me out altogether.
I took their notes and installed WPSC. After a little research I also installed WP Smush.it and WP Minify to boost the page speed and reduce server requests.
I have managed to help the site with a .htaccess script for leverage browser caching: http://thomasgriffinmedia.com/blog/2010/11/how-to-leverage-browser-caching-in-wordpress-via-htaccess
I hope that helps you. It helped me slightly by raising my score up by 7 but only by taking it out of the high priority and into medium so I’m unsure whether it has worked, but still, the score has improved and it literally took less than 5 minutes to modify.
Unfortunately for me, it’s all about the heavy theme load. I can not compress any more .js from my theme or the codes simply will not work.
I’m now a little stuck and still wish to improve my score at least by another 9 points.
Interestingly enough, this didn’t change anything… Besides putting the code in the htaccess file, was I supposed to do anything else? My score didn’t change. If you can’t tell, I’m fairly new to all of this.
I too know nothing.
I do believe it has had a positive effect but I think you’ll have to wait for a bot of some sort to crawl about and notice the amendments first before altering your page score. Don’t quote me on this. I am assuming.
I reckon you’ll be able to minify some of your .js files. Enable them to be minified and put in the ones that are likely to affect your theme in the box where they can be ignored.
.e.g. I have a *jquery.prettyPhoto.js* file. I saw it listed in the Google Page Speed but I know that I can’t minify this as it is relevant to my theme so I put that exact line into the box to be ignored. I repeated this through trial and error with other .js files to see what would be affected and what wasn’t so I could minify as much .js as possible.
It is a little long-winded but in the end it works out alright. But that is just one matter, I too have the same issues as yourself.
I think you may have to get a list of the .js and .css files from your theme provider like what I did so you can see which ones you can minify and which ones you can’t/shouldn’t.
That’s what I did anyway. It helped a point or two but I’m hovering around the 86 mark now and I still want a few points more.
I have selected the advanced function to compress the pages but Page Speed tells me that I could do with compressing more, but I can’t so I too, am pretty stuck now and it is down to my theme.