7 Ways to Optimize The Performance of Your Joomla Website

The first thing that most webmasters will focus on after they have their website up and running is speed. Now after Google have stated that website performance could impact SEO results in the near future, speeding up websites has become even more important. Joomla is similar to many other content management systems so many times the best way to speed up a Joomla website is the same as any other website. However, there are also some Joomla specific changes that can help speed up Joomla website. Let's take a quick look at some fundamental ways to speed up a website as well as some changes that are really only relevant for Joomla users.

Fundamental Ways to Speed Up Any Website and How It Relates to Joomla

Optimizing Your Template

The template that your website is using is often the number one cause of speed loss. While it may look great, it could be slowing your website performance down to a standstill. Joomla has thousands of templates and more are being created every day, however many of them are very inefficient. Some templates use more than 70 small images per page. Even worse is the fact that these images are not always optimized, making your website even slower.

Optimizing the Rest of Your Website

There are a number of tactics that can be used to utilized on any website, including Joomla based websites. One of the first things that many people do make sure that they are encoding their pages with Gzip. This will almost always speed up your website, but not always. If your servers processor is the problem then Gzip will actually slow down your websites loading speed. However, this is rarely the case and Gzip will help website performance of almost everyone.

Many of the other tactics relate to your CSS, PHP, and the like. The essence of all of these tactics is less is more. Remove all of the white space from your template files, especially your index.php file. Remove CSS commands that are not necessary. If there are CSS commands that are used, but only in rare circumstance, then it may help to take those commands and create another CSS file that is only used when needed.

Joomla Specific Methods to Speeding Up a Website

Use Joomla's Inbuilt Caching

Joomla has a built in way to ensure that your website is caching. This can even be used by webmaster who are using a server that doesn't have PHP caching installed by setting it to the file method.

Utilize Joomla Updates

While the biggest reason that you should always have the most updated version of Joomla is security, new versions of Joomla often have small changes to the core that will speed up the load time of Joomla itself. The same is true regarding the Joomla extensions that you are using. In fact, many of the biggest problems relating to a Joomla website often are rooted in the extensions that have been added.

Keep an Eye on Your New Extensions

The Joomla extensions directory has an extension that can do pretty much anything short of washing the dishes. Unfortunately, many of these extensions are often terribly inefficient and can slow down your website dramatically. If you want to single out which components that are slowing your website down the most, there is an easy way to accomplish this. Install a page caching component, but don't enable the caching. This allows you to see the load time for each URL. After four or five days, go through the list that was created and find all of the URL's that are the slowest. There is a good chance that all of the slow URL's have a certain component or two in common that is not on the faster pages.

Another great way to keep an eye on additional extensions is to enable Joomla's core content cache. Then take a look at all of the database queries that are being executed. The goal is to keep this number as low as possible, ideally under 30 although that isn't always possible. Using this information, take a look at any recurring queries and find out what component is the cause. The easiest solution is to simply disable and then uninstall the component. However, if you feel like the component is a valuable asset to your website, contact the components developer and ask them to optimize it, or find/hire a freelance developer to do it for you. Of course, if you can do it yourself then by all means do it yourself.

It is also important to ask yourself if you really need the component. Every component will increase your load time, so it is unwise to frivolously add every component that you see. It is also a good idea to completely delete any components that you will not be using. (The same is true for templates)

SEF?

One the first things that most webmasters do is make their URL's more search engine and user friendly. The Joomla core does this to a certain extent automatically, however many webmasters want a little more control, or believe that it could be done better with an additional component. The problem is that most of these components are extremely inefficient. Many webmasters are willing to trade some load time to keep using SEF URL's, but it is worth keeping in mind.

Avoid Bridges at All Costs

While Joomla is considered to be a very functional CMS, many webmasters choose to bridge it with another program to further enhance functionality. While this seems like a great idea, because both programs work together well and seem to compliment each other, it is often not worth it. Remember, both of these programs function independently, which means that the core of both programs will have to load. This will always cause a huge hit to your websites performance because essentially two pages are loaded every time. If the functionality is vastly improved, then it might be worth it, but this is rarely the case.

There are a number of other tactics that people use to optimize their website and Joomla websites are no different. There are also a number of free tools that can be used to make optimizing your Joomla website easier. What tactics and tools do you use to optimize your Joomla website?

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