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.