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Speed matters most today to the visitors when it comes to websites and is followed by design on Joomla. Joomla is a widely-known amazing content management system that provides a lot of advantages if used well, otherwise can become very slow at performing. Since speed is taken so seriously the most important actions that can be taken to speed up your Joomla website are provided in the following tips.
If Joomla caching is disabled it will cause the software to load many more things every time the pages are loaded. It includes fetching of content from the database, loading the installed modules, plugins and components, the template design used by you and all the total content that is on the page. This process is very tedious and since it takes a lot of time the site loading will also be longer. But once the cache is enabled the actions are stored by CMS and loads up quickly so that visitors are able to get this stored copy of the pages and thus reducing overall load time.
Content Delivery Network is useful as it doesn’t serve your static files from the location of the web host but from global network of servers that are provided by the CDN provider. This way users accessing the site from far away get the files from servers residing in the nearest location except the HTML code that comprises of the ever changing content. CDN basically is designed to boost the performance for end users and adopting it will help improve Joomla site performances.
Joomla lets you send out the pages in a compressed format where the CSS and HTML is compressed on the server before sending it. This compressed file is sent to the user’s machine and is later uncompressed by the browser installed there. This lets the file to be a lot smaller without damaging it in any way. Gzip is a great and effective compression method that is popularly used to reduce the response time of websites.
Images take most KB’s in a web page amongst all the content that is carried on it and that is why they should be optimized beginning with using correctly-sized images. Secondly, the size of the images can be further reduced dramatically with the help of compression tools that will strip off unnecessary data that exists without your knowledge. If you use the right procedure for saving images from Photoshop using the Save for Web and Devices, a .png has the potential to lose another 75% without affecting the image visually.
You may have some fantastic templates used for your Joomla website to make it look good along with the help of some extensions to provide a lot of functionality too. Many a times when you change the appearance or discard a module the old templates and extension still sit installed in the site. Many people think that simply deactivating it will eliminate their bad effect to the site but is completely untrue. Even if you deactivate them they will slow down the site regardless leaving your site to harm’s end. The templates and extensions used for your website ensure that you have upgraded them to the latest versions as they might have fixes for bugs and also some new added features.
When you set up your blog you should also test its speed, especially after you install the new front-end modules or plugins for content. It is recommended to check using the Page Speed plug-in for Firefox and Google Chrome. It provides you with feedback and gives you a list of improvements to make your page. It gives you a score (X/100) which indicates the performance of the page with higher number means the page being better. Follow the instructions provided with the page and re-test the website. This way the time for loading will be reduced and will get a higher Page Speed Score.
Instead of having many CSS and JavaScript use Script Merge to combine all the similar files into one. There are many options available with this plugin like Merge CSS, Merge JS, Compress CSS and Compress JS. Try out all the options and see if the site still works. If you figure out that certain file cannot be merged or compressed then just type it in the “Exclude CSS” or “Exclude JS” box. This way you are loading the files required at a minimum capacity. This will decrease the number of files and connections made to the server helping the speed of the site substantially.
Even if your website is very fast in loading on a desktop it may be so that its performance is very bad on mobile devices. If you are using the Google Page speed tool to check the speed of the website you will notice that there is a separate tab for mobile performances. Even with new techniques like 4G, sites may still take some time to load. The idea is to let only the necessary things load. Hide the stuff using bootstrap classes like hidden-phone and hidden-tablet will though not decrease the bandwidth required. One possibility is to adopt an agent detection that will help to check if the Joomla site is opened on a mobile device and not just on a resized browser window.
Speed and traffic generation is a progressive process especially if your Joomla website is new. It will take some time to get attention and generate traffic but majorly if you keep it optimal for high speed and performance.
Author bio
I’m Ramya Raju, an independent writer/web designer with 8+ years experience in freelance web designing and writing for the web, magazines and other social media platforms. I’m a sociable person, I have a great love and interest for photography. My other interests include anthropology, psychology and traveling to destinations.
Contact: Ramya Raju
E-mail id: ramyaraju896@gmail.com