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.

Every time that a 500 Internal Server Error occurs, you should take the guidance in that error literally: You should contact the system administrator of the hosting environment to report the real error to you. Internally something went wrong, and as long as the real error is not fetched, everybody will be clueless.

These types of problems specifically occur in hosting environments that use some kind of CGI-interface to PHP (CGI, FCCGI, FastCGI, suPHP). It could be that something went wrong on the configuration-level, but it might also be that PHP encountered some kind of PHP Fatal Error. In all cases, fetching the actual log from the logfiles is vital. Note that - unless you have root-privileges - it is likely that you don't have access to these log-files. Therefor, contact the hosting provider.

Here are the three most common reasons why you found 500 Internal Server Error:

1. File permissons set incorrectly.
One common cause for a 500 Internal Server Error are the file permissions of PHP-scripts. In general, all files for MageBridge should have the same file permissions as the other Joomla! files and/or Magento files. A 500-error might be thrown if the file permissions are considered to be dangerous: The execution bit should never be used on PHP-files (755 or 777 or something alike), but some servers also object against the PHP-file being world-writable (666 or 777). File permissions like these can be set either through SSH or FTP.

Another common cause of PHP Fatal Errors that again might generate Internal Server Errors, is that the PHP memory limit (memory_limit) is too low. You should make sure your Joomla! site meet up with the minimum requirements of MageBridge.

How you should modify the PHP configuration accordingly, again depends on the hosting environment and you should contact your hosting provider about this. It might be that you can add PHP-directives to your htaccess-files, but it might also be that you need a separate php.ini file somewhere.

2. Leaving file permissions set incorrectly after manual installation of content management systems, forums, blogs, etc.

3. Coding errors in the .htaccess file.

The best and most easy way to detect error 500 is to check out the error reporting that is generated by your website:

method 1:
1. Log in to the administrator back end in Joomla and than go to the Global configuration option.
2. Than select server tab
3. got to the error reporting option
4. Change this to maximum to get full version
5. click on save button

Method 2:
To track down what is causing the error, you will want to start with the error log in Control Panel. Once you are logged into your Control Panel look for and click on the "Error Log" icon under "Logs."

log_errors = On
error_reporting = E_ALL & ~E_DEPRECATED
display_errors = On

Host Your Joomla Site with ASPHostPortal.com

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Best Server Technology
The minimal specs of our servers includes Intel Xeon Dual Core Processor, RAID-10 protected hard disk space with minimum 8 GB RAM. You dont need to worry about the speed of your site.

Best and Friendly Support
Our customer support will help you 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and 365 days a year to assist you.

Uptime & Support Guarantees
We are so confident in our hosting services we will not only provide you with a 30 days money back guarantee, but also we give you a 99.9% uptime guarantee.

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.

Here we've listed the ten most likely ways your Joomla website will get hacked. How many of them could catch you out?

1. Weak Joomla Administrator Password
Firstly rename the administrator account username from admin to something memorable. I know in the modern world we have so many passwords to remember, I use three words and swap out some letters for numbers, on different sites and services I swap the order of the words, there are only three possible passwords I can use and if I don't know them, they are going to be difficult for other people / hackers to guess. Software enables hackers to run millions of guesses a second, you can configure servers to block 'brute force password attempts', for the main just setting a strong password is enough but remember to change your username from 'admin'.

2. No Security Measures For A Joomla Website
Database prefix, super admin id, upload limits, hot linking, blocking terms in URLs, block all SQL injections, etc, etc.Some of these are basic, some are complicated and should be done by a Joomla professional. From my point of view if your are a serious business and you've not implemented these and other Joomla security measures, you are begging to be hacked and made a fool of. Your website is your online shop window, defacement, spam emails in your name, outbound links to porn sites, user information taken and used, etc.
Falling prey to hackers damages your businesses reputation and costs far more than the costs of cleanup - which in turn cost far more than the cost of prevention. I'm not scaremongering I see it every day, and funnily enough it's never ourselves.
Keeping on top of your website will save you money should something go wrong, a recent large hacking incident set someone back over £2,600 for the de-hack and a further £480 to seal other weaknesses. They needed to retrieve their user's information no matter what, and keep an online presence throughout. With our expert Joomla security measures none of this would have happened. A £350 Joomla security audit would have shown all the potential issues and pointed out how to fix and seal the cracks. A further £360 would have paid for us to do the necessary follow-up work - this would have prevented the hack and also fixed other weaknesses that the site audit highlighted.

3. Joomla Website Re-hacked - Missed Hacker Files
About 20% of our de-hacking jobs come from other developers or site owners who have cleaned out a hacking incident and very quickly been re-hacked. De-hacking a Joomla website is a skill, you can overlay a clean set of files to your current files but what about new files that have been added.
We've created our own script that we add to a client's site, we then search for anything that is not a part of the core Joomla files, we then investigate what these files are, some will be legit and others might be hacker files.
One thing is for sure, our clients never get re-hacked from the same incident.

4. Joomla And Server Login Details Taken From Infected Computers
Malware, Spyware and other computer infections once accounted for a significant proportion of website hacks. People's awareness of viruses and better quality antivirus has reduce this form of hacking, however it does still happen and we have seen incidents of this recently.
Run regular full system scans against all machines that are used to access your website, be careful / vigilant when browsing the Internet and opening emails. Don't risk your businesses reputation, keep your computers clean and free from infections with the added benefit of helping to keep your website clean.
If you are concerned about your website's security or believe you might have already fallen foul to hackers, do not hesitate to get in touch.

5. Cheap Joomla Hosting
Why would you go for the cheapest hosting provider you can find?
Cheap or low cost hosting providers use shared servers that can host up to 1,000 websites. Shared hosting by itself is not bad, but if you pay the minimum for your hosting you know it will not be configured for optimal speed or security.
Cheap hosting is sold as a lead generator
When something goes wrong - and it will - the hosting company will do nothing to help and will do everything to up-sell you to a more expensive package that they claim is more secure - which isn't, it is on the same server but you pay more for nothing extra. For optimum security, smaller hosting providers like ourselves offer the best Joomla hosting packages.

ASPHostPortal.com is a popular online Joomla 3.2 hosting service provider catering to those people who face such issues. The company has managed to build a strong client base in a very short period of time. It is known for offering ultra-fast, fully-managed and secured services in the competitive market.
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ASPHostPortal.com has been offering fully managed backups, updates, and security all round the year without any sorts of interruptions to make sure that the web traffic of their clients’ websites and blogs is not lost. The company is also seen offering maximum security for its clients’ blogs and websites.

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ASPHostPortal.com is a hosting company that best support in Windows and ASP.NET-based hosting. Services include shared hosting, reseller hosting, and sharepoint hosting, with specialty in ASP.NET, SQL Server, and architecting highly scalable solutions. As a leading small to mid-sized business web hosting provider, ASPHostPortal strive to offer the most technologically advanced hosting solutions available to all customers across the world. Security, reliability, and performance are at the core of hosting operations to ensure each site and/or application hosted is highly secured and performs at optimum level.

Great! Joomla 3.2.2 Stable has been released. This has been a great effort with contributions from over 30 volunteers. A heartfelt thanks goes out to all contributors.
This release is a bug fix release, but we recommend that users perform a Joomla upgrade in order to take advantage of the fixes that have been released.

A Joomla upgrade can be performed directly in the Joomla administrative backend.
One of the best new features in the latest version of Joomla is Content History.

Enable within Article Manager
First step, go to "Content" -> "Article Manager" ->"Options"

After that, go to "Editing Layout" tab;
In "Save History" coloum, choose "Yes";
Adjust the "Maximum Versions" setting to your preference. This sets the number of latest revisions to save for the article.
And click "Save & Close".

Test the Feature
For make test feature, enter an article, make a few revisions, then click "Save". Make a few more revisions, then click "Save" again. Finally, click on the "Versions" button to see the saved changes.

In the above screenshot everything's working. I can now preview a revision, restore it, compare it to another, keep it on, and delete it.Remember, the function of Keep On/Forever option is to store that version indefinitely. We using an example in this tutorial because it is an easy way to explain this feature.
Do you know about the function of the Maximum Versions setting? If you set that to 5, then 5 versions of that article are saved. On the 6th one, the 1st version gets deleted so that there are still 5 versions left total. What if you want to keep the first one or any other article? That's where the Keep On setting comes into play. If you enable it for that article version, it won't automatically get deleted from the list, but rather will remain there untouched. It's basically a "lock" feature that prevents deletion.

Joomla is one of the widly used software that allows you to create a professional-looking and user friendly website in a verry short time. And in Joomla Web development, PSD to Joomla conversion is an inevitable process.

Any PSD file can be converted into a Joomla Template by following these three easy steps. Simply go through the following illustrated steps for the PSD to Joomla conversion :

1. Slicing the PSD:
   First, you must slice the PSD file into multiple layers viz. header, footer, content or navigation part. Slicing should be done with a keen eye because it creates the base for your website. You should also work on the parts which you don’t want to duplicate using the CSS such as the images, logo and the buttons. So slice out all your images and save them in a separate folder called images.
   
   
2. Conversion and Styling:
   
   • HTML Conversion : Now next thing in conversion is the coding of  image files in a proper semantic form. It should be kept in mind that your conversion is well structured with a table-less Search Engine friendly semantics.
   • CSS Styling : In another step you have to start developing your Cascading Style Sheet popularly called as CSS. While designing a CSS, you should check whether it is meeting all the requirements of website.
   • JavaScript : In this part of conversion implement all your JavaScript into the website. Make your website more attractive and add dynamic interaction with the use of proper JavaScript.
     
     
3. Joomla Integration:
   Here, you need to be verry consious in order to avoid any inconsistency in the data. It would be better to hire a professional Joomla designer who has all the required expertise to carry out this conversion in an efficient manner. So, now, create a relevant folder and directories required for your website. Create a Template_thumbnail.png for displaying  template image in admin panel and a template_details.xml which will be serving as the  main file that Joomla reads to install a template. Finally make a zip file of the complete folder and install it using the Extension Manager in your Joomla Content Management System.

Now that we have added the CSS and JS files to the Joomla 3.0 template that we are creating, we will now add the Necessary bootstrap files.
While the bootstrap Necessary files can be downloaded from the official site, Joomla 3.0 actually includes the Necessary bootstrap css and javascript files as well. As a template developer, this will the make incorporating these files much Easier.

Some bootstrap loaded with <jdoc:include type="head" />
When we added <jdoc:include type="head" /> within our template's head tag, Joomla automatically added a few JavaScript and CSS files. In the list of files below that Joomla added, you will notice that we've highlighted the bootstrap files that it included:

According to the official bootstrap documentation, we need to include the following files:
1. bootstrap.css (or bootstrap.min.css)
2. bootstrap.js (or bootstrap.min.js)
As <jdoc:include type="head" /> already included bootstrap.min.js for us, we only need to include bootstrap.min.css. To do this, we will update our template's index.php on our Joomla hosting server to include this file. You can see the code we added below that includes bootstrap.min.css, which we've highlighted:

After editing our template's index.php on the server and saving the changes, our template is taking a little more form. You can see in the screenshots below how our template looks with and without this css file.

• BEFORE bootstrap.min.css
  

• AFTER bootstrap.min.css
  

Even if you have a relatively small website, it is likely that you eventually have to deal with hackers. One of the most common methods of hacking is the brute force attack – here hackers will cycle through numbers and letters to try to crack your password. It has happened to Joomla users in recent memory, so it is important to be prepared as much as possible.

The reason that these brute force attacks were successful encompasses a number of different factors. First, you have unlimited login attempts with the Joomla platform. This means that brute force hackers can continue to try until they gain access or are detected. While there is not much the average user can do about this, you can use different tactics to make your site more secure against these hackers.

1. Don’t use the admin username
Many times, the most common usernames are targeted such as admin, webmaster, administrator, test, etc. These all are very common usernames and that’s why, it makes sense to avoid using them. Don’t worry, from the backend, you can select a different name that’s publicly visible. This means that your username can be “amazingme” and you can choose a different name to be displayed on the front-end.

2. Use a strong password
Use a strong password and avoid common passwords such as fghj, 2221, 12345, your name, etc. The brute force attack targets all the common passwords first, and that’s why you should use a strong password that is a combination of uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers and special characters like #@*^. For example; a strong password would be something like h@LL003v3ryB0dy^^#. Also, never use the same password at two different places.

3. Limit login attempts
It is highly recommended that you limit login attempts. This can be done by using a security plugin like Better Joomla Security, or by using Limit Login Attempts plugin.

4. Update core and add-ons to improve Joomla security
Since the most common successful attacks are due to known vulnerabilities in outdated Joomla versions and add-ons, one of the most important tasks for anyone responsible for Joomla security is to ensure that all the software remains up to date.
Thus, one of the most important features that has been added to Joomla is the new Joomla Update Manager which can be used to easily update many extensions, as well as the Joomla Update component to update Joomla itself.

5. Backup often
Take regular backup of your complete Joomla site. Some people don’t give importance to backup, and unfortunately, they realize the value of backup only after a disaster strikes. Also don’t rely much when your host says that they regularly perform backup, because if they don’t, then it will create more problems.