For a final part to our series on speeding up your Joomla site, I’d like to give a recommend two companies who are working on tools to make Joomla faster.
I make it a point to check the Joomla Extensions website every day to keep track of new developments but I’ve only seen two add-ons that significantly improve performance. Because of the price, I can’t recommend these for use this on all sites but if you do have a key website and some spare change, both of these extensions are worth the investment:
As always – there are no affiliate links. The developers don’t even know we’re recommending their products.
- Joomla Performance Booster. (€39.00) Yesterday we gave Joomlatwork.com our "Extension of the Month Award" and today we recommend their cache component? What’s going on? Its simple – they make great tools. This components enables many more files to your site’s cache and allows your site to run more and more from the cache. The downside (as with their SEF Patch) is that you do need to replace a lot of core files but the component makes it as easy as possible to manage the patching without needing to use FTP.
- IE Double Page Load & Hover Flicker Fix PLUS Speed Loader. ($28.50) Wow – what a name! Couldn’t the develoer Steven have though of something more snappy? Only joking 🙂 This does a great job of speeding up page loads for people on slow connections. If your visitors are not particularly tech-savvy this will help greatly.
We use both on our site and hopefully you’ve seen our fast loading more quickly in recent weeks. Google certainly seems to agree. Despite a significant interest in traffic during 2007 we haven’t had any problems with the site slowing when traffic spikes:
(Click here if you want to see you how fast your site is in Google’s eyes)