Focus on being efficient rather than quick. Charging off in the wrong direction will slow you down. Paralyzing yourself by over-complicating decisions will slow you down. Move forward at a steady rate and you will get things done faster.
Of course, there is an element of experience and practice. To mitigate this, select good tools and learn them well. You should not need to consult php.net because you should have an editor that provides inline help. You should not frequently need Google because you should have a smattering of algorithms and idioms that can be re-applied. (For example, a large class of text validation and processing problems can be solved trivially with regular expressions.) "Recipe" style books can assist in developing go-to approaches for common classes of problems. Knowing the important bits of the standard library will help you avoid writing unnecessary code.
Last, but not least, avoid writing code that you don't need right now. This can be big stuff like features you haven't thought through very well. Or it can be small stuff. For example, there's an unfortunate tendency for people trying to do object-oriented programming to define getters and setters for everything. There's no reason to do this (in fact, there are plenty of reasons to not do this, but that's for another discussion) and these little wastes of time start to add up fast.
Of course, there is an element of experience and practice. To mitigate this, select good tools and learn them well. You should not need to consult php.net because you should have an editor that provides inline help. You should not frequently need Google because you should have a smattering of algorithms and idioms that can be re-applied. (For example, a large class of text validation and processing problems can be solved trivially with regular expressions.) "Recipe" style books can assist in developing go-to approaches for common classes of problems. Knowing the important bits of the standard library will help you avoid writing unnecessary code.
Last, but not least, avoid writing code that you don't need right now. This can be big stuff like features you haven't thought through very well. Or it can be small stuff. For example, there's an unfortunate tendency for people trying to do object-oriented programming to define getters and setters for everything. There's no reason to do this (in fact, there are plenty of reasons to not do this, but that's for another discussion) and these little wastes of time start to add up fast.