How to Speed Up Your Joomla Site?

Joomla is a free and open-source content management system (CMS) for publishing web content. It is built on a model–view–controller web application framework that can be used independently of the CMS. Joomla is one of the most popular free CMS in the world that allows you to easily create and manage a dynamic website. In this article I will explain about how to speed up your Joomla site.

Tips for Speed Up Your Joomla Site

As we know that speed is amongst the most important factors for the success of your website. Actually, Joomla isn't slow but you can do a lot to optimize it and achieve great speed for your site. There are the most essential actions you can take to speed up your Joomla website.

First - You should have the latest version of Joomla. It is important for your site speed because in each version there are multiple code improvements. Even if the changes are small - new Joomla versions are generally performing better than previous ones.

Second - You can utilize an .htaccess file and cache all your images, scripts, javascripts and CSS among other things.

Third - If you have a dynamic site built with Joomla, it is usually a good idea to turn on Caching. This means the server does not have to generate a new copy of the page every time someone visits your web page. Instead every 15 minutes, for example, Joomla will Cache your pages so that they can be delivered much quicker.

Fourth - Enabling Joomla compression. You can choose to send out your pages in a compressed format. This will allow all the css and html to be compressed on the server before sending, so a much smaller packet of data gets sent to the user’s computer, and is then uncompressed by the user’s browser. This enables the file to be much smaller without damaging the content in any way. Gzip is the most popular and effective compression method and it generally reduces the response time.

Fifth - You should start your optimization from your photos, because these are an important part of any website. A nice image can improve the content, but on the other hand using too many images can slow down the loading of your Joomla website. Try to decide if all your images are really needed; nice effects are now possible with Font Awesome or by using CSS3 shapes, so sometimes images are not necessary for the aesthetic appeal of your site. Try to reduce the file size of all used images and avoid using huge, slow loading images – 400KB or more.

Summary

A website is never fast enough; it’s a continuous process of finding the right balance between the quantity and quality of the content, and its size and speed of loading these elements. There are hundreds of ways to optimize your site, from simple asset compression to complex load balancing servers. However, the best way to optimize your site is by taking simple steps, having complete control over what content is displayed and knowing why you need them. Optimization; it’s about making improvements in the right places and with the right goals in mind.

Joomla is an award-winning content management system (CMS), which enables you to build Web sites and powerful online applications. Many aspects, including its ease-of-use and extensibility, have made Joomla the most popular Web site software available. Best of all, Joomla is an open source solution that is freely available to everyone.

Blogger is a blog-publishing service that allows multi-user blogs with time-stamped entries. It was developed by Pyra Labs, which was bought by Google in 2003. Generally, the blogs are hosted by Google at a subdomain of blogspot.com. A user can have up to 100 blogs per account. Up until May 1, 2010 Blogger allowed users to publish blogs on other hosts, via FTP. All such blogs had (or still have) to be moved to Google's own servers, with domains other than blogspot.com allowed via custom URLs. Unlike WordPress, Blogger cannot be installed in a web server. One has to use DNS facilities to redirect a custom URL to a blogspot domain.

Do you want to standstill with your Blogger website? Because there’s no more space for improvement? Probably, it’s about time for a game changer. So, in order to gain your website perfection, you may easily change your blog publishing platform, as an alternative, you might take a chance and import your Blogger content to Joomla. You may ask what good is it.

Firstly, Joomla is an open source CMS platform that allows to create advanced and scalable websites. It provides with the ability to manage professionally look like web projects that might be expanded with the various extensions. Also, you may adopt the authentic template that will suit your niche best. One more speak-for-itself advantage of Joomla is the thing you are the only owner of your website, when Blogger may delete your content any time with no reasons.

So, if you have made a choice to perform your Joomla migration, there are a few steps that will make your switch and site management flawless and smooth.

1. Make a Backup.
To get started with your Blogger to Joomla import, at first you should backup your current site data. It helps to exclude the data loss risk.

2. First, Install Joomla Website.
Install a new Joomla website. Also, you may activate some additional extensions. In the case of a blog running, it’s recommended to upload some of the following extensions: JComments, K2 (with this extension you don’t have to activate JComments), EasyBlog or something likes that.

3. Install a New Template.
The first thing you need to do is to download the new Joomla template you're willing to use for your site on your hard drive. Once you have your Joomla template downloaded on your computer, login to the administrative area of your Joomla website and upload the template through the Extension Manager (Extensions -> Extension Manager). The process is the same for templates, modules, plugins and components. Once the template is installed in your Joomla 3 application, you need to make it default for your website so your pages get the new design. First, you need to go to Extensions -> Template Manager. On this page, you will see a list of the installed templates available for your site and the administrative area. Locate the one you want to use on your site and click on the star icon next to it.

4. Get Blogger and Joomla Access Details on Hand

5. Migrate Blogger Content to Joomla
It’s available to try the automated data conversion.

6. Set up 301 URLs redirects from Blogger to Joomla.

7. Activate SEO Extension.

For remember, before launching your website data migration, analyze your traffic. It's recommended to proceed with this when the index is the lowest. And then when the transfer of your website is over, you should ask your website visitors to recover their passwords.