5 Quick Ways to Speed up Your Joomla Website

Joomla is great for building powerful websites and online applications. The ease with which Joomla-based websites can be extended and the ease with which such sites can be managed have made Joomla one of the most popular CMS in the market. However, heavy websites running on Joomla tend to take a lot of time to open. Thankfully, there are ways in which savvy developers can speedy up a Joomla website.

How to make your Joomla site faster?

If you’ve built a Joomla website and are looking for ways to speed it up, this blog will guide you in the right direction. As long as you have a basic understanding of Joomla, you can take the below steps and speed up your website. These steps will work even if you don’t have full-time webmaster or dedicated server.

1. Remove Extensions that you Don’t Need
Before removing any extension or code, I will suggest that you to backup your website. You can use joomlapacks to do this. In this case, even if you end up removing something and realize that you need it, you can simply go back to earlier version. Now remove all the unnecessary extensions. Once you do this, there will be less code and your website will load faster than before.

2. CSS/JS Optimization
CSS / JS optimization is used to remove whitespace & comments and to combine and compress all selected css files and js files into one. I know that doing all this manually may be too time consuming. But there are extensions out that they will make things easier for you.

CSS files can be aggregated and compressed into a single file, while JavaScript files are only aggregated (but not compressed). These optimizations may reduce server load, bandwidth requirements, and page loading times. CSS/JSCOMPRESS is a good solution for this problem. This will be installed as a plugin and it will allow you to exclude any css/js file.

3. Site Caching
Each time visitor makes request to view any page, Joomla uses database and PHP to display that page. What if we could store the HTML output? We can, and this storing is what ‘Site Caching’ is. Here, Joomla will create a page and will store it to caching, and this page from cache will be displayed to next requesting visitor rather than loading a fresh page.

Undoubtedly, this it will add complexity to your website. But you definitely having performance definitely gain in terms of performance.

You may further read about Joomla caching in detail to improve the website and make it better.

If you want to use Third party extension you can use them.

4. Hosting Matters a Lot
Hosting is the key element in making your site faster. If you have a slow server, all the above improvements will not matter. How to find out whether you are on a good server or not? You can check your response time graph from your uptime monitoring company.

You can work with Pingdoms for response time graph.

Now, if you feel that your hosting company should do better, you can present your response time graph to them and ask what they can do help improve your site performance. They may move you to another server or they may not. The best thing is to spend a little more money initially and get a hosting company that offers faster servers. And if you can move to VPS hosting, there are plenty of excellent options available.

You can also choose a Joomla-specific hosting company. Cloud Access is a good option.

5. Use Uptime Monitor
First you need to develop a response time baseline. Uptime monitor gives you response time reporting of your site. A good uptime monitor provides you a lot of information regarding your website.

You can use Pingdom as they provide one sign up option where you are not supposed to pay and you can monitor one site.

Below are some other tools and resources for website optimization.

PageSpeed Tool

YSlow

joomla Performance Grader

Site Page Test

Website Grader

Following the above steps will definitely help you speed up your Joomla website and it will load a lot faster than before.