These are good tips but I'm not sure they're novice accessible. Implementing memcached or bytecode cache are non-trivial.(PHP novice but an experienced coder maybe, but when I hear PHP novice I tend to think novice coder in general - my bad)
But this does make a great place to start if your little php site is starting to get more traffic then you dared hope and its time to start dealing with some scaling issues.
If I'm going to give a novice PHP'r tips it would be along the lines of thinking about using a good stable framework.
Adding an opcode cache speeds things up, but can expose segfaulting bugs in PHP modules that write to errant pointers and corrupt the cache. One of the features I like in xcache is readonly cache protection, which helps prevent these kind of problems.
But this does make a great place to start if your little php site is starting to get more traffic then you dared hope and its time to start dealing with some scaling issues.
If I'm going to give a novice PHP'r tips it would be along the lines of thinking about using a good stable framework.