Things I have learnt over 5 years of being a webmaster

I have been let's say a silent member of this forum for many years and have gained significant advice over the time. So I thought in return I would summarise all of my tips or things that I have learnt that I wish I had known much earlier so as to help any newbies setting up a new site.

Screaming Frog - is great for checking internal and more importantly external links for your site. This helped me find many links which I had missed that I had changed from HTML to PHP or just been to lazy to do 301 redirects. SF is free

Cloudflare.com - A free content distribution network for their basic set up and relatively cheap. Very easy to set up (just had to ask host to change DNS name servers). By doing this I opened my site to the world and saw all of my ranking increase. Simply amazing product

Add a set time out of 30seconds (or more) to google analytics code, this will provide a realistic bounce rate for your site especially if it is an information/answer page where visitors will never go onto another page. I use this to identify the pages which need work if the average time is less than 30 seconds. The additional line to google analytics code is:
setTimeout("ga('send', 'event', '30_seconds', 'read');",30000);

Translate your pages, I use Odesk and this has doubled the amount of content that I have on line. Some none English markets have very little completion for difficult English key words and the Adsense CPC is still very high (eg France) while Spanish opens up an entire continent.

Do not steal images from Flickr or others, go to Dollarphotoclub.com and pay $99 for 99 royalty free images - many great images at a sensible price.

Make your site fast and use pingdom.com/fpt/ to check the speed of your site, see that all images are optimised and everything loads as sensible as possible. The free speed test tool is here:
Website speed test

Learn HTML and CSS3, it is not that difficult. CSS3 is all about drawing boxes and then making them look good while HTML is writing some logical lines and linking - code always look more daunting then it actually is. The main advantage of knowing HTML and CSS3 is that you understand your site, know how to make it faster and know how to resolve issues.

The best (in my experience) performing advert is a 728px by 90px which is in the main article. This position forces the reader to at least skim over the advert, also this size fits all tablets. I personally have 1 page for desktop/tablets and 1 page for mobile. To make the desk top fit the tablet a loose a right hand navigation bar via CSSS3 "display:none"

Have a PHP redirect to a mobile page. This mobile page can be cut down with less unnecessary graphics, code and be optimised for mobile. My redirect sits in the header of the main page and I have a rel="canonical" link from the mobile page. There are many other better and complex ways to redirect but this is enough for me:
<?php
$iphone = strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'],"iPhone");
$android = strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'],"Android");
$palmpre = strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'],"webOS");
$berry = strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'],"BlackBerry");
$ipod = strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'],"iPod");

if ($iphone || $android || $palmpre || $ipod || $berry == true)
{
echo "<script>window.location='link to the new page'</script>";
}
?>


I hope these tips or suggestions prove as useful to someone as they did to me when I learnt or found them